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The Daily News
1 Okay so happy Monday!
2 Last Thursday night I had written a nice piece for Xanga. It took me a while, but I thought it was a nice piece.
3 On Friday morning I went to edit the story and then sent it out to the troops.
4 Xanga had too many things coming at it at once and couldn't handle it.
5 First, it had to deal with my Toshiba laptop which has the horridly irritating Windows 8. Next, it had three different things it was trying to work: Internet Explorer, Mozilla, and Chrome.
6 Only Chrome would allow me to edit, and quite suddenly none of them could launch Friday's DN to Facebook.
7 I did what I usually do in that situation which is to go to my desktop Dell, go to Mozilla and launch the DN. That has consistently worked in the past.
8 <basketball buzzer>
9 Nothing would launch Friday's DN.
10 It wasn't the greatest piece of journalism ever, but it did have time put into it and some usual goofiness with a bit of fun, none of which, it seems, will ever see the light of day.
11 In the past that would happen in the morning, but would usually right itself by early afternoon.
12 Friday night it still hadn't righted itself. I saw the Titanic that is Xanga begin to sink. The stars brightened, the ship moved to ninety-degrees, and I finally made my way to a lifeboat, which is this piece of driftwood I found while floundering in the icy waters.
13 Lousy analogy I must confess. It's a toehold. It I find myself up against a morning deadline, it'll have to do. Might get better in a few days.
14 Friday night I decided that after years of working with Xanga, I finally have to abandon it. Not completely, mind you. It still has my archives, which date back to May of 2004. Come May of this year, that'll be ten years of the Daily News on Xanga. Xanga has been a pretty fun medium, always with its quirks, but pretty easy to navigate and to trick.
15 And the price was always right. I don't remember if I ever paid them any money until recently. Maybe a few dollars every few years. Can't really recall, to be honest. It's just that the past couple of posts had things that were completely edited suddenly un-edited. Posting pictures took me through a longer ritual, although that could be attributed either to Windows 8, or to my own stupidity. Bottom line: I can't trust Xanga anymore. The un-editing was getting unbearable, and the inability at times to go back and edit became absurd.
16 So the Xanga era of the DN is probably coming to an swift end, even though if you read my last couple of posts, they were all clearly edited, worked on, and fun. They just took three times as long to write, edit, upload pics, edit, try to upload pics, re-edit to the point of ridiculousness. I would edit and save; Xanga would say it saved, and when I would go back to check, all of the edits had reverted back to their pre-edit status. If you were doing an all-nighter for a class and Microsoft Word kept un-editing, you might get pretty frustrated, right? Same thing.
17 So I'm moving the DN to Blogger, which is ironic, since I have ALWAYS maintained that the DN isn't a blog. It was around in 1996, before the word "blog" was ever invented. It began as hard copy, moved to a Geocities YB Drama website that eventually died in the weeds (they claimed I hadn't paid them, and I had. Phone calls, letters and all the rest failed to prove I gave them my lousy thirty bucks or whatever, but that is what became of my YBDrama.com website, which was awesome. Too bad about sorrows, right?). That website contained the first archives of the DN, but it would appear that YBDrama.com is gone forever. Maybe I could retrieve it, but I like living in the present and in the future. What's past is prologue.
18 The bottom line is that the DN has wound up here. I haven't changed my style, and I hope to continue with the DN. It has been an integral part of my life for the past seventeen years. It isn't a deep thing, it's just always been a lark, and a LOT of fun, sort of like remote-control airplanes, or quilting.
18 It's ALWAYS a bit silly, of course, and was getting more frivolous than ever as recently as last week.
19 Moving on, Part 1: How it Works on Facebook: I have two Facebooks, each of which posts the DN.
20 One is for our alumni, former colleagues, current colleagues, and quite recently, my present students. The other is for family, friends, former colleagues and even former students. I just don't think my current students would really be interested in seeing me do a cannonball off a high dive. The very vision could do permanent damage to the eyeballs, as well as a shaky psyche. So fear not; you're safe.
21 AnywayZ, last Tuesday a student I had taught when he was a freshman posted something to the effect of, "Let's go Class of 2014!" I'm sorry, I don't have the exact quote at my fingertips. His name is Sumit, and he's awesome.
22 Sumit had always come in to visit over the past three years, and it was always fun to see him. He would always yell into my door, "We LOVE you Mr. Harrington!" I would always smile.
23 While I have had the DN open to EV students for a couple of years, I have had little interaction with them on Facebook. Yet the DN was originally designed with a student audience in mind. It was a originally a communication resource for people working on our Drama/Musical productions. It would be posted hard copy on the wall of the Performing Arts building at YB.
24 Let's fast forward then to this year, and Sumit's rallying cry to the Senior troops. He posted it early last week on the first day of school. Sumit had become a Facebook friend at some point last year, so I was able to see his post on Tuesday. I had to comment. I had to. I wrote something like, "Let's DO this!"
25 Within an hour I had something like thirty "likes" on that Facebook page.
26 To your average Facebook person, that's probably not much. To me, it was an avalanche. Suddenly thirty students saw my Facebook for the first time and responded. I'm pretty sure a lot of them were Leadership students.
27 I laughed, and of course loved all the attention.
28 So the DN was now blowing its doors open to the current student population.
29 Ironically Xanga was shutting down its sinking operation, causing me massive stress for something that is ordinarily something I love doing.
30 I had given up on Xanga early in the summer, but wanted to keep it for the archives, and simply for the charm and for the nostalgia.
31 Sounds a bit corny, but a LOT of people began posting things on Xanga when it was new and different.
32 It was originally a venue for artists, poets, photographers, story writers, boasters, sports' fans and drama queens.
33 I am a perfect combination of all those things. I took to it early, taking on the persona of a fellow named El Directore, even though everybody knew who I was.
34 I think that guy has his own archives somewhere, and it's probably just as well nobody could find it. It wasn't the DN, that's for sure. I'll dig for it. It had a few okay things.
35 But it wasn't the DN. It took itself much too seriously and that should NEVER happen.
36 In fact, I was going to post nothing but upbeat, idiotic things for the entire early part of this school year, just to see if I could make people's oatmeal and coffee splash through their noses and eyes each morning.
37 I think we all need a good means of starting one's day, and that was going to be the DN: a digital morning paper that wasn't controlled by fear mongers and controlled reporting.
38 I am not afraid to kick a democrat or a republican in the ass if it is needed. I just don't care.
39 The state of journalism in 2013 is deplorable. The entire KTVU debacle with the names of the pilots of the Asiana crash highlighted everything that is wrong with today's news.
40 Talking heads. Controlled thought to the point that a story of Onion magnitude got past an entire studio and aired publicly in all its racist glory.
41 We need the Daily News, even if the name was stolen from New York. We need the Daily News, because we need to see what's IN the Daily News.
42 The name was not stolen from the New York Daily News, by the way. It was stolen from Guys and Dolls, as in, "What's in the Daily News? I'll tell you what's in the Daily News! Story about a man bought his wife a ruby with what otherwise would have been his union dues!
43 "That's what's in the Daily News!" and on and on.
44 Yessir.
45 Pure fun.
46 I fully intend to keep up with that fun.
47 So today's DN is historic. It is officially the end of the Xanga era and the beginning of the Google era.
48 As I said, I'll keep Xanga for archival purposes, but hope to import the Xanga archives into Word Press, which is some sort of cloud that connects all of this.
49 I'll take everything as it comes. I have absolutely nothing bad to say about Xanga except that they couldn't keep up with the times.
50 I also think they might think about working with the nostalgic angle. It was a sweet and innocent use of online entertainment, and quite often I would see some pretty artistic things come down the pike.
51 It was a pre-My Space/Facebook/Tumbler/Twitter time, and I thought a beautiful medium for artistic souls to express themselves.
52 The times jumped ahead of Xanga. The Facebook. The Social Network. The World According to Zuck. Meh.
53 So farewell Xanga. Thank you for always keeping it sweet, even if you never really did make it easy to let us write, edit, send to whomever we wanted without having constantly to switch among the giants in order to make it all happen.
54 I had lots of fun over the years, that's for darned certain.
55 I'll visit every now and again, just for old times' sake.
56 Meanwhile, live life.
57 Love life.
58 And fly low.
59 We'll see you again.
60 Peace.
~H~
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