# The latest muse-letter was sent out to subscribers earlier today.
You know the drill.
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# Thanks to David Kanigan I now know the source of a quote that I have been listening to for nearly 30 years:
What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night.
The source is said to be the last words of the Blackfoot Chief Crowfoot. The full quote is as follows:
What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
How wonderful is that?
I have lived with those first words for so long, used brilliantly by the late Pete Namlook. It is such a great feeling to finally be able to place them.
@colinwalker good luck with the move!
@cm Thanks
@colinwalker All the very best for the move, Colin. It was some 9 years back that we had taken a similar decision to move across the country -- and it'd all worked out for well. I am sure it would for you too ??
@colinwalker I think the link is as important as the text itself on a blog, but now, we also have quotes, and hence can reduce the need for the link. But with minimum viable readability with links achieved, blogs can offer a rich and immersive experience.
Ref:
@colinwalker Best of luck with the move! ??
@colinwalker Good luck on the move.
@odd I don’t see how quotes reduce the need for links? The point of the link is to direct the reader elsewhere not just offer them a snippet with no way to see for themselves.
@bix It doesn’t replace the need, but for casual skimming, it might reduce the need for links was my thinking.
@odd I might agree that for the reader it adds options, but for the blogger there should never be the lack of a link. The idea always was to let the reader have easy access to what's being discussed so they can judge for themselves what the blogger had to say about it. But I guess what I was really perplexed by was the idea that "now we have quotes". We have always had, and used, quotes. The only thing new today is fancy css styling because for some reason I guess someone thought why let Twitter have all the fancy embed action?
Before I even was quite awake this morning I ran into something that confused me greatly, but I sat on it for awhile in order to figure out exactly why it nagged.
Two things here struck me. First, nothing reduces the need for the link. The entire thing that made blogs what they are is that you could write about something you’d read and no matter what you had to say about it you could provide the reader with easy access to it so they could judge for themselves. Quoting doesn’t obviate links. The second thing, though: that took the morning to sink in. What can it possibly mean to say that “now, we also have quotes”? We have always had quotes. I used one above. I use them all the time. I only can assume that this is a reference to Quotebacks, which is just a bunch of custom styling for blockquotes with the citation built-in, I guess so that Twitter doesn’t have all the fun with fancy embeds. I’ve been confused about the Quotebacks thing since they launched, and the above remark kind of illustrates a bit of why. Quoting isn’t new. Whatever value people might find in Quotebacks, for the love of god can we not discuss them like they are some sort of revelatory experience heretofore unknown to blogging. Yes, you can (block)quote me on that. (I should say that I guess I hope it was a reference to Quotebacks, otherwise the comment really doesn’t make any sense.) Bonus observation: I’m glad to see that Colin Walker is reading Rebecca Blood’s The Weblog Handbook, which I’ve been mildly pushing people to pick up. It both relayed and informed much of how we thought about blogging in the early days.
@bix Yes, I suppose we have had the ability for quotes all along, but the readability and automatic thought of “This is obviously a quote” is much much more obvious now with better styling, and it is more like a textbook than a computer terminal of old. As for the article @colinwalker wrote, where he used quotes by Blood, I got the gist of it without having to look up Bloods articles or buying her book, but Inow have made a mental note of it, and might get it later. I think links are essential to blogs, but it can be overdone, and reduce readability.
Before I even was quite awake this morning I ran into something that confused me greatly, but I sat on it for awhile in order to figure out exactly why it nagged.
Two things here struck me. First, nothing reduces the need for the link. The entire thing that made blogs what they are is that you could write about something you’d read and no matter what you had to say about it you could provide the reader with easy access to it so they could judge for themselves. Quoting doesn’t obviate links. The second thing, though: that took the morning to sink in. What can it possibly mean to say that “now, we also have quotes”? We have always had quotes. I used one above. I use them all the time. I only can assume that this is a reference to Quotebacks, which is just a bunch of custom styling for blockquotes with the citation built-in, I guess so that Twitter doesn’t have all the fun with fancy embeds. I’ve been confused about the Quotebacks thing since they launched, and the above remark kind of illustrates a bit of why. Quoting isn’t new. Whatever value people might find in Quotebacks, for the love of god can we not discuss them like they are some sort of revelatory experience heretofore unknown to blogging. Yes, you can (block)quote me on that. (I should say that I guess I hope it was a reference to Quotebacks, otherwise the comment really doesn’t make any sense.) Bonus observation: I’m glad to see that Colin Walker is reading Rebecca Blood’s The Weblog Handbook, which I’ve been mildly pushing people to pick up. It both relayed and informed much of how we thought about blogging in the early days.
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