wingolog

Greetings, dear readers!

Welcome to my little corner of the internet. This is my place to share and write about things that are important to me. I'm delighted that you stopped by.

Unlike a number of other personal sites on the tubes, I have comments enabled on most of these blog posts. It's gratifying to me to hear when people enjoy an article. I also really appreciate it when people bring new information or links or things I hadn't thought of.

Of course, this isn't like some professional peer-reviewed journal; it's above all a place for me to write about my wanderings and explorations. Most of the things I find on my way have already been found by others, but they are no less new to me. As Goethe said, quoted in the introduction to The Joy of Cooking: "That which thy forbears have bequeathed to thee, earn it anew if thou wouldst possess it."

In that spirit I would enjoin my more knowledgeable correspondents to offer their insights with the joy of earning-anew, and particularly to recognize and banish the spectre of that moldy, soul-killing "well-actually" response that is present on so many other parts of the internet.

I've had a good experience with comments on this site, and I'm a bit lazy, so I take an optimistic approach to moderation. By default, comments are posted immediately. Every so often -- more often after a recent post, less often in between -- I unpublish comments that I don't feel contribute to the piece, or which I don't like for whatever reason. It's somewhat arbitrary, but hey, welcome to my corner of the internet.

This has the disadvantage that some unwanted comments end up published, then they go away. If you notice this happening to someone else's post, it's best to just ignore it, and in particular to not "go meta" and ask in the comments why a previous comment isn't there any more. If it happens to you, I'd ask you to re-read this post and refrain from unwelcome comments in the future. If you think I made an error -- it can happen -- let me know privately.

Finally, and it really shouldn't have to be said, but racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism are not welcome here. If you see such a comment that I should delete and have missed, let me know privately. However even among well-meaning people, and that includes me, there are ways of behaving that reinforce subtle bias. Please do point out such instances in articles or comments, either publicly or privately. Working on ableist language is a particular challenge of mine.

You can contact me via comments (anonymous or not), via email (wingo@pobox.com), twitter (@andywingo), or IRC (wingo on freenode). Thanks for reading, and happy hacking :)