Welcome to the Make Data Make Sense log! Let’s jump right into talking about making data make sense. We can anticipate creating a lot of data on this log, so how can we ensure it will make sense?
First, with a meaningful name. This is not a “blog” because “blog” doesn’t make sense. What does “blog” mean? Anyone can tell you by now, it’s short for “weblog.” But why were we ever talking about “weblogs” anyway? That’s just redundant. We can see it’s on the web because we’re viewing it in a web browser. Just like there’s no point in appending “www.” to the front of every domain name, there’s no point in calling this a “weblog.” It’s just a log.
Our next step in making this log meaningful is using WordPress. WordPress isn’t perfect, but it’s widely used and open source, so we immediately gain access to a wide variety of plugins to do interesting things with data. We also gain access to themes.
The theme we’re using is based on Sandbox. Sandbox is a visually plain WordPress theme, so it allows for simple restyling, and it also incorporates microformats where appropriate in the markup, which is good for reasons we’ll explore another time.
That should be enough introduction to the log for now. Hopefully it makes sense. And data.
3 Comments
you said: “there’s no point in calling this a ‘weblog.’ It’s just a log”, but a log is not published publically, it’s just a private record of events. a “weblog” is different from a log.
of course you may call this whatever you’d like, a journal even, but i do think there’s a distinction (and valuable one at that) between weblog and log.
So the difference between “weblog” and “log” is that “weblog” is whether or not it’s public? If “log” is assumed to be private, why use “log” at all in “weblog”? Dictionaries don’t seem to share this assumption that “log” is private. The most appropriate dictionary definition for this “log” is probably “A record of courses or operation. Also, a device to measure speed.”
good luck pushing against the lexical tide, scott. though the dictionary definitions may not mention the word “private,” all of the logs referred to in those examples are not for public consumption. the public wouldn’t eat logs, they’re too woody.
as for me, i’m trying to get people to stop using “in spite of” when they mean “despite,” even though there’s nothing grammatically wrong with either. i just think “in spite of” sounds like you’re angry.
i don’t expect to have a lot of luck with this.
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