Issues with Lexember posts

So, as you may have noticed with the last two posts, things have been a bit messed up here on this blog. As I mentioned in this post, I make my Lexember posts on Tumblr (my main blog these days, sorry about that), and they should automatically be copied over here for my readers and the readers of the Conlang Aggregator. I have a special IFTTT applet set up specifically for that.

Unfortunately, it seems IFTTT is throwing a fit with my Lexember posts, and cannot copy their contents over to Blogger. The result being the empty post you may have seen appear yesterday (before I filled it by hand when I discovered the issue). I tried to solve the issue with IFTTT, but quite simply failed (I can't seem to find what is wrong with IFTTT. It should work, but it clearly doesn't), so today's Lexember post ended up as an empty post here again. This time I immediately set out to fill it by hand, but I did so using the mobile Blogger app, and it messed things up too (I need to check how to make it accept HTML input). I've now cleaned up the post contents so it shows up correctly, though.

Basically, this has been a train wreck, and to prevent further damage, I have disabled the misbehaving IFTTT applet. I'll simply copy my Lexember posts over by hand (and will do so on my computer only, at least until I can figure out how to make the Blogger app work correctly). I am not abandoning this blog, don't worry about it. However, being unable to count on automation means the Lexember updates may not always appear on time here. If you really want to read my Lexember updates as soon as they are available, I advice you check out my Twitter stream instead, or to follow my Tumblr blog directly (but I hope you don't mind pictures of cute animals, especially dogs!).

Sorry for the inconvenience.

A belated project finally bears fruit!

Quite a while ago, I mentioned that I was working on a project that would greatly increase the amount of posts on this blog. At that time, I thought I'd be ready by November 2009. As you can see, this was off by more than a year!

However, the time has now come! After scaling back my ambitions down a little bit, I managed to get things ready to start publishing all those posts I've been keeping secret, and I will start next week! So what is it all about? Well, to explain it, I'm going to have to go back in time quite a bit. Please bear with me here.

As I've mentioned before, I love manga and anime. That love started in the 80's, as I was lucky enough to live in the first country to massively import Japanese animation series, and it carried on through the 90's (and still exists today), where I became enamoured with Sailor Moon. This series, that would redefine the entire Magical Girl genre, lasted 18 manga volumes, 5 anime seasons, 3 feature films, countless musicals and even a live-action version! That's an enormous amount of content. However, by the end of the 90's in France, most of that content (at least what existed at that time) had become unavailable: the series had stopped being aired on TV before the end of the 4^th season (and the fifth one would never be dubbed) and only one film had found its way to France. Only the manga was being released (slowly), but that was not quite enough to satisfy my thirst for more material.

Luckily, by 1997 I had for the first time in my life access to a computer with an Internet connection (at that time, Internet at home was a luxury, and a slow one at that!), and one of the first things I did was to look for info on Sailor Moon. That's how I discovered a vibrant fan community, both in French and in English. Most importantly, I discovered the fanfic phenomenon. Sailor Moon had (and actually still has) a very prolific fanfic community, and I spent a lot of time reading those amateur stories featuring my favourite characters. Most stories were of dreadful quality, but there were a few pearls shining among the drab.

All this reading, as well as corresponding with a particular fanfic writer, kind of woke up my writing bug (I used to write short stories). I wanted to write something, something in the style of Sailor Moon and the Magical Girl style it had created. However, I didn't want to write just another Sailor Moon fanfic, for two reasons. Firstly, I didn't feel like I could do justice to the characters created by the mangaka Naoko Takeuchi. And secondly, I wanted to write something I could call entirely my own. It would be influenced by Sailor Moon, but it would be an homage rather than a copy. It would be episodic fiction, would take some of the formula created by this series, but would otherwise be an original work.

So I started to think about what to write, the characters, the setting, the story. But I was blocked, until I had a breakthrough: what if Sailor Moon had been a boy instead of a girl? That was it! I would write a Magical Boy story, with the same elements as Sailor Moon, but with a boy as the main character. Then, I needed a motif: just like Sailor Moon had the planets, I needed some kind of basis (using the planets as well would have been too close for comfort). This time, the breakthrough came after a rainy morning, when a rainbow appeared in the sky. My main character's alter-ego and powers would be based on the rainbow, and his companions would be based on colours! Names for the characters came easily: the word rainbow is an obvious compound. So my main character would be Rain Bow, and his companions Red Bow, Green Bow, Yellow Bow, etc. The overarching theme of my story also came from this rainbow motif: rainbows have always been symbols of hope for me, so hope would be the main theme. Another theme was copied straight from Sailor Moon. While its main theme is romantic love (it's the love between Usagi and Mamoru that allows her to use her powers at their maximum level), a secondary but important theme is the power of friendship. That fitted perfectly in the story I wanted to write.

With all those elements and a few others, I started planning my story. I just needed one more thing: a title. I finally thought up an English one: Rainbow Fighters. In French, it became: Rainbow Fighters : Les Combattants de l'Arc-en-Ciel. And with this in hand, I started writing. And I wrote, a lot. I published all those episodes on my old website (they are still available for those who can search the web!). I wrote very fast at first (sometimes one episode per week). But slowly, life started eating away at my free time, and by 2001, I was obliged to take a rest from writing. I left my characters and my readers with a very uncomfortable cliffhanger, but I just didn't have the time nor the energy to carry on. I was originally planning for the hiatus to last for a few months at most, but the months quickly became years...

Then in 2008 I started thinking back at the story I had been writing. At that time I was trying to find a solution to increase the frequency of my posting on this blog. That's when I realised that the blog format was perfect for episodic fiction. And I'd always wanted to resume writing this Rainbow Fighters series, so I'd be killing two birds with one stone by publishing this story to my blog!

However, after spending some time re-reading what I had written, I realised I couldn't post my episodes as is: between the typos, the grammatical mistakes and the weird writing style, I needed to re-edit them first. So that's what I've been doing: re-editing each episode from the first one, getting them ready to post on this blog. While I was doing that, I started thinking about adding more material than just text, so I started creating some graphical material. Also, I decided I wanted a new title for the story, something that was closer to anime titles, something in Japanese, something that I could make into a logo (like the one on this page).

And I've done it! So it is with pride that I present you with the series that will from now on be published on this blog:

This reads as Kibou Niji Rengou Reinbō Faitāzu, or in English Rainbow Brotherhood of Hope: Rainbow Fighters. On this blog, I will normally write the title as Kibou Niji Rengou Rainbow Fighters, although I might sometimes use the short form Rainbow Fighters.

Kibou Niji Rengou Rainbow Fighters tells the story of Angel, an average 15-year-old French high-school student living in Paris. His world is turned on its head when he meets Niko, a speaking multicoloured bird, who tells him he is Rain Bow, the messenger of hope, a warrior with the mission to protect the Earth from the attacks of evil monsters. Suddenly, Angel must fight monsters, search for his companions, and discover the true goal of his enemies.

Kibou Niji Rengou Rainbow Fighters episodes will be published at the rate of one per week. New episodes will always be published on Fridays at noon Amsterdam time (GMT+1 in winter, GMT+2 in summer). If you are interested in reading them, there are a few things you need to know first:

• Although this post is in English, the series itself is written in French. That's just how I originally wrote it, and given how long the re-editing already took, I just would never have been able to translate them as well. So this series is and will always be written in French. However, I try to keep the language I use relatively simple, so anyone with a high-school level of French should be able to read it, and Google Translate shouldn't make too much of a mess of it. And if you are interested in translated Kibou Niji Rengou Rainbow Fighters in English (or in any other language), please read on: I have a special message for you.
• The series takes place (or at least starts) in 1999. It's never mentioned anywhere really, but that's when I originally wrote it, so the context is that of the year 1999. I thought about modernising the story so that it would fit the current day, but the world has changed so much in the last 12 years that I couldn't do that without rewriting big parts of the plot and the context, and it would have postponed the publishing almost indefinitely. So I decided to leave the story as is, however dated it is. See it as a "historical drama"! Nevertheless, the world has changed enough in the last 12 years that I think a small primer on the year 1999 is necessary, especially for those who were too young to remember much of the last millennium. Those are only a few pointers, but they should give you a feel for the differences between 1999 and 2011:
• In 1999, the Internet was nowhere as ubiquitous as it is today. While schools, companies and governments had access to the Web, most homes hadn't. And when they had, it was slow! The browser of choice was Netscape 4, and webpages were mostly text and a few images. Videos and music were too big to stream via Internet. Wireless Internet was still a dream. Even Google didn't exist yet! (Altavista was the main search engine)
• Mobile phones were a toy for successful businessmen constantly on the move, and nobody else. And they were phones only! They had no camera, and smartphones didn't exist at all. Very technological-minded people had PDAs, and a few PDAs could be used as phones (the ancestors of the smartphone), but those were very expensive.
• Music was still mostly sold on CDs. MP3s did exist already, but only to play music on computers. MP3 players didn't exist yet (the iPod would appear in 2001). DVDs players were still too expensive for mass consumption, so although the DVD already existed films were still mostly sold in videotape format.
• Digital cameras were rare and expensive items, used only by some professionals. Most photos were still made with traditional cameras, using photographic film.
• Computers were much slower than they are today. The first 1GHz processor (a Pentium III) would only appear near the end of the year. A 10GB hard drive was a luxury, as were CD burners. Flash drives hadn't been commercialised yet, and SD cards didn't exist. People were starting to worry a lot about the Y2K bug.
• Bill Clinton was still president of the USA. The Kosovo War, which would mark the disintegration of the country of Yugoslavia, was starting.
• The Matrix was released in theatres.
• If you know the Sailor Moon storyline (especially that of the anime), you will notice similarities with the plot of Rainbow Fighters. Some of them I introduced on purpose. Others forced themselves onto me, with the story going in a certain direction and refusing to budge whatever I tried to do. As I wrote above, this story is an homage to Sailor Moon, that started with me wondering what it would have been like if Sailor Moon had been a boy. So it was only natural that I would reuse some elements of the plot, although I changed them enough that the story can be considered original. There's nothing wrong with that: original fiction always draws on earlier sources (West Side Story is basically just a retelling of Romeo and Juliet, after all. And even Romeo and Juliet draws a lot from earlier sources, like Tristan and Isolde). And that includes Sailor Moon itself!
• You may also notice some similarities with other, more recent Magical Girl series, especially the Pretty Cure metaseries. In this case, I can claim prior art: the storyline of Kibou Niji Rengou Rainbow Fighters has been relatively fixed since 1999 (even the parts I haven't written yet!). Anyway, stories written in a similar genre will often use similar elements.

If you don't want to miss a single episode of Kibou Niji Rengou Rainbow Fighters, the best way is to use a news aggregator, like Google Reader or Firefox, and subscribe to my feed. You can also follow my blog via Google Friend Connect (see the "Follow" button on the sidebar). If you're only interested in Rainbow Fighters and don't care about my other posts, you can also use one of those special feeds:

• Atom 1.0 feed: http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/Rainbow%20Fighters
• RSS 2.0 feed: http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/Rainbow%20Fighters?alt=rss

The first one should always work, but use the second one as an alternative if your aggregator has problems with the first one.

The episodes will be released as normal blog posts. In other words, comments are allowed, and even encouraged. Don't hesitate to tell me what you thought about the week's episode! Also, like the rest of this blog, they are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Netherlands License. This means that you are welcome to copy the episodes verbatim, as long as you correctly attribute them to me (and a message to me would be welcome, as well as a link back to this blog. But those are not mandatory). Derivative works are not allowed under this license. This does not mean that I don't allow any derivative work (on the contrary, I'd love it if people liked Rainbow Fighters enough to want to draw its characters and/or animate their transformation sequences! Eh, was that too obvious a hint?), but that if you want to create something based on this story and/or its characters, you have to ask for my permission first. And I'm more than likely to give it.

Translations of Kibou Niji Rengou Rainbow Fighters in other languages fall under this "No Derivative Works" rule as well. However, my goal is to reach as many readers as possible with my story, so it is in my best interest to make translating it as easy as possible for anyone interested. So I hereby grant everyone the right to translate Rainbow Fighters into any language they want, and publish the translations. I only have a few conditions associated with it:

• Please contact me before you start publishing the translation. I have already created canonical translations for some elements in various languages, and I want those to be used. Please refrain from publishing until we have discussed a little and I've given you the green light.
• The translated episodes must be published in the same order as the original episodes, and no episode may be skipped. This may sound like common sense, but I just want this to be clear up front.
• The translated episodes must be published under the same license as the original ones (i.e. the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 license), although you needn't use the Netherlands version of it. Just use the national version that fits with the country you live in. Also, my name must appear as the writer of the original version, as well as a link to this blog.

If you agree to those conditions, I have no problem with you translating my story in whatever language for which you feel up to the task!

Well, that's it! Enough introduction, I'll see you next Friday, for the first episode of Kibou Niji Rengou Rainbow Fighters. It will be easy to recognise, as the logo of the series will appear on top of it:

So brush up on your French, and I hope you'll enjoy the ride! See you next week, à la semaine prochaine !

Reports of my death have been highly exaggerated

No, really! I'm sorry I haven't posted anything on this blog for *gasp* more than six months. It could look like I've been neglecting it, focussing solely on Twitter for my Internet bragging needs. But nothing could be further from the truth: I've actually spent a lot of time on this blog!

The problem is that that spent time is just invisible for you: I've been preparing something special for this blog, a secret project I've actually alluded to a few times on Twitter. This project is going on, and has resulted so far in something like 25 (!) posts that are just waiting for the right moment to be published. That right moment is approaching (the posts will be published weekly), but I just have quite a bit of work left to do before I can actually publish them.

Part of this work is to actually get a few more posts ready (I am trying to build myself a comfortable buffer, so that publishing can carry on even if I'm not able to write new posts at the necessary speed). But another part of that work (and one that has been time-consuming) is to create bits of artwork to go with those posts. Given that I'm bad at drawing, and have little experience with graphics software, this has been a uphill battle, but one I feel I'm actually winning!

So in order to prove that I'm not pulling everyone's leg here, I thought I'd show some kind of teaser of the work I've been doing. Here it is:

Like it? I've made this bit of 3D graphics using Blender (that Blender for Dummies book really came in handy!). It's not finished yet, but I think it looks great already (for something done by an amateur). And it should give you some clue of what I am actually preparing (people who remember my original website will know exactly what I'm talking about).

So there. I'm really working on a project that I will unveil as soon as possible (I can't be more precise about the time-line as I don't know myself when I'll be ready, but I think beginning November is as good a bet as anything). In the mean time, I'll try posting a few things here, but I can't promise anything. And there's my Twitter stream anyway.

All right then, have fun trying to understand what this teaser is all about! Don't hesitate to comment on this post with your theories, however wild they are!

I'm all a-Twitter!

If you've come here in the last week or so, you've noticed that things have changed a bit in the sidebar. I've added quite a bit of contents there in the last weeks, like the blog roll, but the most important thing here is just under my profile: yes, I'm on Twitter!

For a long time, looking from the sidelines, I felt Twitter was a waste of time. So what made me change my mind? Well, I discovered lately that a lot of people I respect were already on Twitter, and they've been praising the micro-blogging platform. Since there was just no way all those people could be wrong (most of them aren't known for falling for the latest Internet fad), I decided to look into the phenomenon more closely. Doing so, I discovered not only that there seems to be something to this Twitter craze other than hype, but also that it may even be of use for me! Indeed, I know that my Internet presence (basically this blog) suffers from two issues:

• I don't update nearly often enough to achieve a sustainable readership. Unfortunately, I'm a slow writer, and I don't often find a subject I feel comfortable writing about. I have quite a few posts lined up, but none is anywhere ready for release. And that brings me to the second point.
• My posts are generally too long-winded. I lose myself in the details, can't seem to be able to write a paragraph less than 20 lines long, and my style lacks punch.

Twitter's format seems particularly fit to help me tackle these problems:

• It embraces short, frequent updates, and feels more informal than a fully fledged weblog. It encourages updating even when you haven't got much to say, and since I have to confine my updates to 140 characters I don't suffer from the fear of not knowing what to write about.
• By strictly enforcing the 140 characters rule, Twitter forces me to concentrate my thoughts and use less words to express them. This can only be good for my writing style.

So I've decided to give Twitter a try, and so far I like it. And to make it official, there's nothing better than blogging about it!

So what can you expect from my tweeting?

• Expect it to be more personal than my blog articles are. I blog only about things I find important, but I still try to keep my personal life out of it. Twitter is more of an immediate reaction kind of medium, so expect to see glimpses of my personal life in there, once in a while.
• Twitter's motto is What are you doing? I'll personally try and focus more on What are you thinking about? Do expect some tweets to be simply about what I'm doing at the moment though, if I feel it is exemplary and/or interesting.
• I'll try and send links to sites, articles, videos, and other things I find around that I find interesting, as often as possible. I've never really been able to do so with the blog because of the time it takes me to write an article. By the time I'm finished, the issue/article/blog post has been debated to death, has become out-of-date, or has simply been forgotten, and whatever I had to say has become meaningless. The Internet is a bit too fast for me at times. However, with Twitter I can quickly send a link with a few words of my own, five minutes after I've discovered the site.
• Expect my tweets to be even more random than my posts, although the same themes will probably recur. I have a wide range of interests, and the Twitter format is even better than the blog format to let me talk about it all.
• If you follow me, I'll make sure to follow you back. It's the least I can do.

Besides what you can expect of me on Twitter, here's what you cannot expect of me:

• Don't expect me to update my status 50 times a day. I'm no Stephen Fry!
• Don't expect me to tweet much during the weekends or holidays. I don't have a smartphone, and I only have a company-owned mobile phone. So currently I can only tweet when in front of the computer, and that's mostly at work or in the evening.
• I'll try to use the social features of Twitter as well, rather than only soliloquying, but don't expect me to be a champion replier from the get go. I still need to dip my toe in to check how hot the water is.
• Don't expect me to suddenly show up on Facebook, Myspace, Hyves, or any other social network. It's nice and all, but a Twitter account, a blog and a website are about all that I can manage (given that my website still hasn't been updated after all this time, this shows you how well I can manage).

So, here I am, all a-Twitter! You can follow my tweets here, or via the RSS feed. And if you're on Twitter yourself, don't hesitate to follow me and/or give me a shout! Happy tweeting!

Some info about my blog feeds

Lately I've decided to finally join the 21^th century and start using feeds to read the blogs and news sites I'm addicted to, rather than hop on from site to site hoping something has been updated. Why did I wait for so long? I'm not sure, but I think the main reason was that most newsreader programs, whether desktop or web-based, looked too much like e-mail clients. Reading news or blog articles to me is an experience that is very different from reading e-mails, so I just ignored the whole RSS feed phenomenon altogether.

However, as the number of sites and blogs I went through everyday was growing too much for my manual way of doing things, I realised I needed some automation, and decided to look again at this news feed thing.

After looking very hard, and eliminating some obvious contenders (mainly Thunderbird and Google Reader, which still look too much like e-mail clients. Although in Thunderbird's case, the reason is quite obvious!), and thinking hard about the fact that I'd like my feed list to be synchronised between the various computers I use, I settled for Brief, a Firefox extension which basically transforms Firefox's Live Bookmarks facility into a simple but efficient desktop news reader. And since it uses Live Bookmarks, Foxmarks takes over the job of synchronising my feeds between computers.

So, now that I was set up and enjoying my increased blog reading productivity (I am now following 48 feeds. Switching to a newsreader was past due!), I thought of the people that might want to follow my blog via their newsreaders, and realised it was not optimal for them. For this reason I did some small changes behind the scenes, and added a Subscribe widget under my profile widget on the page.

But if you want to do it manually, here is the feed's URL:

http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

You needn't worry about Atom or RSS: the feed is automatically translated to the optimal format for your newsreader.

A few months ago, someone asked me whether you could subscribe to the RSS feed for a specific tag (or label, if you use the Blogger terminology). At that time, I thought it was not possible, but it actually is, and here is the kind of URL you need to do that:

• Atom 1.0 feed: http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/tagname
• RSS 2.0 feed: http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/tagname?alt=rss

Just replace tagname with the tag you want to subscribe to. There's a list of the tags I use on the right column of my blog, and I try to be both consistent and slightly redundant when I use them, so you should be able to use them without missing a relevant post. Note also that those feeds are not automatically translated, so you need to specify it if you want an RSS feed rather than an Atom feed.

So people, I've given you all the needed tools for comfortable newsfeeding. Fire up your newsreaders!

My First Comment!

I got my first comment a few days ago, yay!

OK, I know it's spam, but beggars can't be choosers. I'd probably get more attention if I posted more often, but to do that I need to focus on short, topical posts, and when something interests me I tend to want to tell a lot about it (I tend to go into tangents too (but you've already noticed that I think (not to mention too many parentheses))). I could also try and make an effort to shorten my sentences and revise my style. It's quite obvious English isn't my mother tongue. I know, I can be a pain to read. I'm learning though.

In any case, I've been busy with a big post these last weeks. Nothing very important, just a subject I like very much, nicely illustrated thanks to the multimedia possibilities of the Web. Look forward to it! (although I won't hazard a publication date, I don't think you should wait longer than a week or so)

Copyright Notice

Even if you're one of the three people who have found my blog already (I do need to advertise it a bit more), you probably haven't seen the copyright notice at the bottom of the page. I mean, who reads copyright notices anyway?

Well, if you've clicked on the Groklaw link in my "Nice Links" list, you will realise that issues of copyright are actually important in today's world, especially on Internet, and that's why I've decided to put on a clear copyright license here, even though there's not much in terms of contents yet. And because I find strict copyright too restrictive, I've chosen to release my articles under a Creative Commons license.

However, after reading a few articles from the Technology Law Culture blog (specifically this one and that one), I realised that different people might have a different interpretation of the license I chose for my blog. In order to reduce ambiguity, I decided to add an explanation of my intentions here. If you wish to use some of the work I have published on this blog, and are unsure of what you are allowed to do with it, please refer to this article. If you are still unsure, just send me a message and ask for explicit permission. I don't bite anyway!

So let's just look at the copyright notice line by line, and I will explain what I exactly mean with each line:

• The very first line: Columns of the Christophoronomicon © Copyright 2007 Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets, is the actual copyright notice. Note that under the Berne Convention, it is unnecessary. Copyright is automatic and needn't be indicated. However, there's no harm in being precise, and it's practical to have my name on every page so people know who to attribute my articles to.
• The second line: Comments are owned by the individual posters qualifies the first line, so that it doesn't look as if I'm claiming copyright on other people's words on this blog. It also means the following license does not apply to comments: as I don't own them, I have no right to decide how they might be distributed.
• The third line is the meat of the notice, with a Creative Commons image (which links to the simplified text of the copyright license I chose) followed by the text: Unless otherwise specified, articles are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Netherlands License. The link goes to a page with a simple description of what the different aspects of the license mean. It's in Dutch, but you can change the language to English. Here is a run-down of what I meant when choosing this license:
  • Unless otherwise specified: this little qualifier just means that the license here applies to all articles on this blog and their contents (images, videos, etc.), unless I write otherwise in an article. So don't go assuming that absolutely all my articles are published under the same license. This is only true if I don't put a specific notice in an article (which may happen for instance if I show an image I don't own but I got permission to reproduce).
  • Creative Commons: by putting my articles under a Creative Commons license, I allow anyone to copy, distribute, display and perform what I write, as long as they agree to a few conditions.
  • Attribution: the first condition is that I receive credit for my work. In practice, that means that if you use my work, you need to refer to me by name, and add a URL to the article you used on my blog (put it in the references if you're writing a book, make the link clickable if you're on the Web).
  • Non-commercial: this is a more complex condition, as different people have different ideas of what commercial use means. My personal interpretation of it (which is the one I expect people to follow, as it is my work we are talking about) is: if you are a non-commercial entity (i.e. a private person or a a non-profit organisation) and you are not using my work with a money-making goal in mind (e.g. in a book you intend to sell with a profit, or in an advertisement campaign to sell something), the license gives you enough permission already to copy and distribute my work. Note that I don't consider using my articles on an ad-supported site to be commercial use of my work, as long as it's a personal site or the site of a non-profit organisation. In any other case (e.g. if you are a commercial entity, like a company, or an individual acting on behalf of a company, or if you want to make money using my work), the license does not automatically authorise you to copy or redistribute my work. That does not mean that I explicitly forbid it. It just means that you have to ask me for an explicit permission. You can do that via the comments, or per e-mail via my profile.
  • No Derivative Works: this condition means that you may not alter my articles without my explicit permission. You are allowed to quote them, or copy and redistribute them in full, but you may not make changes (except what is needed to reproduce them on a different medium, like a book for instance), unless you ask me first and I give you permission.
  • Netherlands: this means that my work falls under the Dutch Copyright Law regime. It has a few consequences you might want to be aware of. First, Dutch Copyright Law, like European Copyright Law in general, doesn't have a concept of fair use. Instead, it has a few additional laws that allow things like quoting (for a purpose of commentary or analysis) and back-up copies. But it's usually more restricted than the American concept of fair use. Of course, this doesn't have much influence here, as the license I chose grants you more rights than what fair use normally does anyway. Second, Dutch Copyright Law has a concept of author's moral rights. This means that if you use my work to slander me, or reproduce it in a manner that distorts its purpose or mutilates it, I may revoke the license I gave you to copy and distribute my work, even if you otherwise obeyed the conditions of this license. Of course, we are all civilised people here, so I don't think this will ever come into play.
• The final line is just a link back to this article, so that people can always refer to my own words when looking at copying and reproducing my work.

OK, I understand this all looks very heavy-handed, and a bit useless given what this blog has been containing so far. But I'm pretty sure it'll become handy in the future. As we say in French: Mieux vaut prévenir que guérir (I'll leave the translation to you as an exercise. Who said legal documents couldn't be educational?).

Oh No! Not Another One!

Welcome everyone!

This is my first (non-filler) post to my blog, so please excuse the awkwardness. I'm like a small bird learning to fly (and hoping not to ram his head into the ground).

When I first thought of starting my own weblog, I kept having the same thoughts: why should I start a blog now? In a world where everyone and their grandmother is already blogging, why should I expect anyone to be interested in whatever I wanted to talk about?

These worries haven't left my mind I must say. However, the reasons why a blog might actually be something worth starting became clearer with time, and eventually overruled my original thoughts. So I signed up, chose a title, a URL, a template... and found myself in the dreaded situation of the First Post.

I quickly made a small filler post, just to give myself some thinking time. But writer's block was already creeping in. What should my first article look like? Should I start with a presentation of myself? But readers would get just as much information by clicking on my profile, and I would probably look like an egocentric know-it-all (I'm not saying I'm not an egocentric know-it-all, I'm just saying I'd rather have you discover that later on). Should I just start directly with an article on some meaningful matter? But that feels so impersonal. One just can't start a meeting without a bit of informal chit-chat first.

And then it hit me: I should introduce the blog itself, and explain why I decided to start one in the first place. It'd serve as a nice formal introduction, and would help me jump over that first-post block. And who knows, you might even find this interesting.

So here they are, in full glory and in no particular order, the reasons why I started a blog:

• I already have a website. However, it's in dire need of a revamp, both of the contents and the presentation (which is why I don't link to it. It's just too shameful. To give you an idea, think pre-2000 presentation, backgrounds making the text unreadable, the worst presentational HTML you could ever find on Internet, and more than half the site in perpetual "under construction" state). I've been meaning to redesign it from scratch, now that I've learned things like XHTML and CSS, as well as good web practices, but I never managed to actually start the work. I hope to use this blog as a platform to bootstrap this redesign work. That's also why I chose Blogger to host it. Having the code of the templates available for tinkering is a great way to actually practice webdesign, without having to start from scratch (so expect the site to change shape quite often in the next months).
• A side-effect of my website's status-quo is that I haven't updated it since 2005. It's just too painful. But things have changed a lot in my life, and the information available on the site is now extremely outdated. Moreover, I know quite a few people who are interested in what I had been writing, and I've been neglecting them for far too long. This blog will give new breath to my online life.
• I actually was once a journalist... OK, that's exaggerated, I've just been editor-in-chief and article writer of the university newspaper. But it felt like journalism, people seemed to appreciate my work (even when they disagreed with my editorials), and more importantly: I liked doing it. And I've been missing an outlet to write my thoughts and comments. Forums and comment areas on other blogs can only get you so far. I just needed my own place.

So now that things are set, let's get started! I hope you'll enjoy the ride!