Saturday, May 28, 2016

No Best-of-AVI

I started weeding through my earlier posts, in the hopes of weeding the 5000 posts down to 1000 and putting them on the secret blog, with a dramatic reveal when done, and then weeding those down to 200 or so that would be the definitive AVI posts.  But I have found it tedious and not possible.  I see now that it was always editors who culled the best from earlier writers, because it is tedious to do oneself.

8 comments:

james said...

Is that a request?

Sam L. said...

I couldn't. My picks would be those I liked more than others, as I don't know that I could identify the best of your posts.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

It was not a request. The burden is large and the reward small, I think. It is worse for me because I would have a temptation to edit a phrase, which would lead ultimately to a few hundred major edits. That's not what blogging is - like Chesterton's columns or George Will's they exist in real time.

Feel free, any of you, to send along nominations for reposts to wymanhome at comcast, but if it's not a good use of my time, I'm not seeing how it's a good use of yours. Unless you just want I've-a;ways-wanted-to-be-an-editor practice.

james said...

There have been several times I've linked a few of your posts and wished they were consolidated somehow--because what I wanted to convey was the connection between part of each longer dissertation.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

I've done that a few times. Suggest at will.

GraniteDad said...

That is always the hard part with your posts. They are really one long conversation with us. They all tied into each other. When I have tried to find something I felt was a nice pithy, tied-together item, I usually find it is for five posts on the same item. It's part of the charm, but also makes it hard to pop in and visit for a single post.

Mostly, I just miss Copithorne. Maybe you could do a "best of" comments post, and a "worst of" comments post.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

@Granite Dad - I think that's it exactly. Blogging is much more conversational than a weekly newspaper column, and the medium dictates what type of message comes across.

Retriever said...

Well, at least you're weeding and selecting...the digital hoarder in me finds that very difficult, whether w posts or photos. That's what redundant multiple terabyte backup drives are for..
Have you ever considered just printing the whole thing in chronological order, as is? No editing? That might be the most faithful to the development of your thinking and the dialogue in the comments...

One thing that I've often thought you should do is collect posts by theme, but don't necessarily weed too much. A post doesn't have to be your most brilliant to add to your treatment of a topic. And it might have better comments than a stellar post. If you did this, you wd have to include snippets such as a good comment thread from a link with a good couple of lines of yours about it that sparked the thread. Snarky remarks often get things going.,,