Tag Archives: debate

Citations, Emphasis and Italics

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Wanna get a headache? Go type “html book titles italic em” into Google and read for about 15 minutes. What you’re looking at is an intense debate over the best way to mark up a book title using HTML. I’ll save you some time and tell you that after several hours, my conclusion is that you should use the <cite> element for book titles. If that’s all you need, then feel free to save yourself the trouble of reading the rest of this, but if you’re curious about the logic, read on for an explanation.

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In Which We Shut Down Everyone's Accounts

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Earlier this week, we set up some new user accounts for people. We did this for a variety of reasons, but the main ones are that people have asked for accounts, and we wanted to try something new. Now, for another variety of reasons, we have shut down some of those accounts.

I was never entirely comfortable with the concept of giving away a bunch of admin accounts on the site, but we had received many requests, and one person in particular accused us of being “elitist,” and suggested that the site would never grow if it remained just the three of us. After talking with Steve about it for awhile, we decided to give accounts to a few people and see how it went.

This is where we got pretty nervous. We were basically giving up editorial control on the site, and we weren’t sure how it would go. To be honest, we didn’t like the way we saw the content level of the site was headed. The more we talked about it, the more I realized how unhappy I was that we had given out so many accounts. We finally came to the conclusion that a smaller number of accounts would be best, and so we left three accounts in place and shut down the rest.

I apologize to any of you who are put off by this decision, but it’s not going to change. This site is not now, nor was it ever intended to be, a large-scale community forum. We feel that retaining these three accounts will provide a nice counter-balance to us, while still maintaining a high level of quality in the posts.

One final thing I would like to point out is that this site is not a democracy. This decision is not open for debate. This is my site. I own the domain. If you don’t like the way I run my site, that’s too bad. I will do what I like with it. The reason I refer to “us” making decisions on the site is that I value Steve and Miles’ opinions, but the final decision on any matter on this site is mine.

I was absolutely stunned that some people felt it was acceptable to criticize the way we run this site, insult us personally and then demand a user account! I don’t owe any of you anything. If you like the way we run this site, that’s great. If you don’t, that’s just too goddamn bad. It’s my site and I’ll run it the way I want to.