Tag Archives: Meta

Oh, No

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For over a month, the top search term that’s showing up in my website stats has been “No Magazine”, which was the name of a theoretical magazine I made way back in 1994.

But it’s also the name of a new New Zealand magazine edited by Delaney Tabron and Fraser McGregor. I’ve had a flick through it and it looks good, and I was interested by Mikey Havoc’s interview with Tabron and McGregor on bFM last week.

It’s obviously generated a lot of excitement and people are googling it, looking for more information. But here’s the terrible thing: No Magazine doesn’t appear to have a website!

I’m not expecting a full-on webstravaganza like Metro magazine’s [old] website; just a basic website with information about what the magazine is, who’s behind it, what’s in the latest issue, how much it costs and where you can buy it - information that will let me blog about it. And that doesn’t take much effort or expense to set up or maintain.

But yet they haven’t done it and so all these interested, potential readers are instead finding their way to my 14-year-old ezine and probably feeling a bit annoyed.

If a magazine doesn’t have a web presence, does it even exist online?

There we go

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The LiveJournal ties have been severed! I have officially stopped posting to secretpassage.livejournal.com! It’s a strange feeling.

I’ve been delaying it for ages because LiveJournal is heaps of fun. But it’s ultimately more important for me to be able to take all my online writing – secret-passage.com, LiveJournal, and new stuff – and have it all in one place.

So while it’s kinda sad to say goodbye to the posting part of LiveJournal, it’s really exciting to finally have my website up and running. And I’ll still have my LiveJournal Friend page, which is my most visited website.

And I like that due to the magical powers of RSS, the stuff I write here can still appear on LiveJournal and my Facebook profile. You can nae escape me.

Hey, does this mean I’m a blogger now?

On the down low, yo

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There was an article about blogs in this week’s Sunday magazine, part of the Sunday Star-Times. Written by journalist (and former blogger) Deborah Hill Cone, it was about how there is more to blogging than people arguing about Iraq, and that there are actually some interesting, well-written blogs out there. Cool.

(Of course, if you’re reading this, you already knew that, right? But rumour has it that some people still think blogging is about writing really radical and controversial stuff like “George W Bush makes me sick!!!!1″)

In the penultimate paragraph, there was mention of my *ahem* blog:

In The Secret Passage Mt Eden blogger Robyn uses annoying yoof vocab like “old skool” and “on the down low” – but she also writes lively posts about bad poetry, karaoke and appearing on the Jim Mora show.

I must make the following observations:

  • Yo, I don’t usually be using annoying yoof vocab like “old skool”, but on occasion when I be doing that shit, I’m taking the piss, yo. Word.
  • I’ve never used the phrase “on the down low”. I am so uncool I don’t even know what it means. However, I will endeavour to use it so I don’t disappoint any SST readers who come visiting.
  • Bad poetry, yes; karaoke, yes; Jim Mora,… what?! Another mystery. I’ve never been on the Jim Mora show. It’s possible this was confused with my appearance on National Radio in December, but that was hosted by Jon Bridges.
  • Lively posts? Hey, I like that description.

But the funny thing is that the URL to this site was published incorrectly. Tragically a www. was put before the secretpassage.livejournal.com, which results in a 404 error. Some smart SST readers ought to be able to figure how to get here, but others will be flailing about in cyberspace on the down low.