A blog by an American expatriate living in the heart of New Europe


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  Name:
  Gustav
  Location:
  Warsaw, Poland

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Saturday, September 09, 2006

Warsaw Station turns two

I've officially been blogging for two years now.

I must have an awful lot of free time on my hands.

19 Comments:



Anonymous Anonymous said...

Congratulations to you and your contributors! You're doing a great job for those of us who don't get the news of central Europe from the MSM.

By the way, where's Redneck Texan been?

9/09/2006 02:53:00 PM  


Blogger Gustav said...

Thanks Chuck.

RT's around, but prefers to comment on US politics, I'm sure. I haven't been posting much on that lately. I ought to.

He comments on football matters, though.

Right now he's probably gearing up for the big game, which I wish both teams could lose.

9/09/2006 03:47:00 PM  


Blogger beatroot said...

I must have an awful lot of free time on my hands.

You make it sound a bit sad.

A better way to think about blogging, and writing, is that instead of sitting passively like a burak in front of the TV, you are doing something active, communicative and creative.

Bloggers of the world unite, all we have to lose are our coach potatoes!

Happy birthday Gustav

9/09/2006 10:01:00 PM  


Blogger Gustav said...

Hey Beatroot, did you see that we have a new friend?

9/09/2006 10:06:00 PM  


Anonymous Anonymous said...

Happy birthday to your blog :)

9/09/2006 11:28:00 PM  


Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hey where did my name go? It was me :)

9/09/2006 11:30:00 PM  


Blogger Redneck Texan said...

Congrats on the 2 years. I am glad to see you are still blogging. Yeah, I don't know / care much about Polish internal politics, but I am happy you have found a niche you enjoy, and it appears your participation level here is good and getting better, and I know thats an important part of making blogging fun. I got you in the RSS reader, and visit when something piques my interest, and I try to check in every few days to check out the conversations.

Don't you remember when you had a seemingly unlimited backlog of subjects you wanted to opine about?

Can you imagine a scenario where you maintain a blog for the rest of your life?, or do you expect to permanently sign off at some point in the future?

I wonder if Google / Blogspot will be able to give away bandwidth indefinetly......if Blogger where to collapse at some point in the future, would you pay to have a blog hosted?....essentially is blogging important enough to you to pay, say $100 a year, for what you get for free now?

How would you compare Blogger to wordpress?

which I wish both teams could lose.

I know you do.....I am just glad OSU is #1....a loss wont cost as many places in the poll, and if you win your.......NUMBER ONE BABY.

9/10/2006 03:27:00 AM  


Blogger Gustav said...

Thanks RT,

I know you come around from time to time, since I see the comments and your IP pops up on the sitemeter from time to time - the RSS read is mutual - I've got RR's RSS plugged into my Firefox, and go check you guys out every couple of days as well.

And Polish internal politics does, obviously, pique my interest, not least because it directly affects my life. Can't say the same for you - which is why it's cool you show up anyway. Plus, everybody is doing US politics - it's difficult to find an original angle. I'm one of the only ones doing Polish politics in English - so far.

And I still have plenty of things I could opine about - But sometimes I wonder whether there's any point, especially with American politics, the tone has gotten so shrill.

Then again, whenever there's an electon coming up, it always gets the juices flowing. Shrill it may be, but eventually I won't be able to resist the urge.

And that's when I know I'll be seeing you and maybe (hopefully - I really mean that) Wafflestomper and maybe DC/Johnny Mozart. But I'd like to find a subject that would get them riled up, and would also get some of the more liberal bloggers that comment on most of my Polish-topic posts to speak up. I'd really like to see that discussion - one liberal on 20 conservatives or vice-versa is tiring and lopsided.

Can you imagine a scenario where you maintain a blog for the rest of your life?

Yes, because I enjoy writing and being creative so much. It seems like each day there's a cool new feature that one could add to a blog to make it more fun. The cool thing about a blog is though you do have readers that could be let down, it's always possible to take as long a break as you want, and then begin again. I don't rule out signing off - but for now I enjoy it enough to continue for the foreseeable future.

would you pay to have a blog hosted?

I already do with p3, our wordpress blog, so yes, I would.

How would you compare Blogger to wordpress?

True enough, with wordpress I get different features than with blogger, but they're very similar. Wordpress is a tad more complicated. I'm still a bit confused about my host, and how to save files there, and changing things around is much more complicated. With blogger, I can adjust things more easily (Just one style sheet, rather than 5!). But with wordpress you get cool features like categories and the "read more" button, which would be useful for some of my longer posts here (Blogger says you can do this on its system, but it's really just a glorified link to the post page). However, on Blogger it's much easier to write posts in HTML - which I do 99 percent of the time. For my last post on p3 it was impossible to get the line breaks the way I wanted them (either in HTML or in rich text writer), and I finally had to give up and post it ugly.

I don't like all the blogger-specific tags in the blogger stylesheet though either - one day I'll figure out what they all mean and change them. My ideal blog would be host-specific-tag free, and combine the ease of writing in HTML of blogger with some of the better features of wordpress (i forgot ot mention that on your wordpress dashboard you have a record of the most recent comments and links to your blog, and you also have the ability to leave a comment directly on the post page).

Sorry about yesterday's loss for your boys by the way. Can't say I'm TOO sorry - but it sure would have been nice for OSU to have one in the loss column before Michigan plays them - and when it comes down to determining the conference champ. But maybe now they'll have a calse sense of security come November.

9/10/2006 06:06:00 PM  


Blogger Gustav said...

Looking at my last comment - I think I'll have to keep blogging for the rest of my life.

I can't bloody shut up!

9/10/2006 06:09:00 PM  


Blogger Redneck Texan said...

Since our Blogger templates are more than 2 years old, (pre-Google buyout?)they didn't come with the "recent comments" tag that some of the newer ones do.

But since you use the built in Blogger commenting system here, you can copy & paste this code into your template, if you want a recent comments function in your sidebar.

Yep.....Vince Young was a one man gang freak of nature, there is no way Texas would have won a National Championship without him, nor are they likely to win another one any time soon without him.

9/10/2006 08:54:00 PM  


Blogger Gustav said...

Thanks for that!

9/11/2006 10:16:00 AM  


Blogger Redneck Texan said...

It looks kinda weird though......its not in chronological order???

You would think the most recent comments would be on the top.

9/11/2006 06:10:00 PM  


Blogger Gustav said...

No it's not in chronological order, and I can't make the BlogCommentDateTime any shorter either. I also can't switch it for which post it was blogged on - that would at least go some way towards alleviating the non-chronological order problem. I was suspicious when on the page you linked I read this:

Disclaimer: These aren't strictly the most recent comments, but just the comments for the post on the current page. Also, they will show in order by post, rather than by comment date/time. But in general, comments left on front page posts will tend to be the most recent, so this should be close enough and it still provides an overview of commenting activity.

"In general" being the key words...

I'm going to fiddle with it some more this evening and if I can't make it better off it goes.

One more reason to go to Wordpress. Aargh.

9/11/2006 06:44:00 PM  


Blogger Gustav said...

Got it. I used this hack.

I've been reading about new features in the new blogger beta (blogger in beta?) that they're rolling out now. Apparently, they have introduced a "labels" (ie, categories) feature, and - god be praised! - a RSS feed for comments.

Here's the tour. I guess there will be a lot more functionality for the templates too, without knowing code.

But still haven't read anything about a Blogger "recent comments" feature, nor a "read more" button.

9/11/2006 11:19:00 PM  


Blogger Redneck Texan said...

Looks great now.

I have always wondered how, if someone commented on an old article deep in your archives, you would know about it. Now if that happens it should pop up on top of the recent comments eh?

I have also been gonna ask you if there was a comment RSS feed for Blogger's commenting system......let me know if that ever happens.

You owe me a post at RR. ;-)

9/12/2006 01:47:00 AM  


Blogger Gustav said...

Actually, it's happened a couple of times, and I know about it because i have comment notification by e-mail. I can click the link in the e-mail and it takes me back to the old, old post too. Very convenient - especially with gmail and it's notification functions.

Unfortunately though, if someone comments on an old post it WON'T show up in the recent comments thing, because the javascript only reads through the comments on the PAGE, not through the whole blog. Thus, if you go into one of the pages in the archives, you'll see the most recent comments ON THAT ARCHIVE PAGE - and not within the entire blog. (I changed the original javascript so that it actually would show up on the archive pages. It wouldn't have shown up at all in the archive pages with the original code.)

It's not a perfect solution, but it's ok. Like I said, with e-mail notification I always knew when there was a comment. The "speaking their minds" recent comment section in the sidebar is more for my readers than for me. And it might get some more folks commenting.

And thanks for the invite back to RR - I had had some ideas, but was a bit lazy, and anyways I was planning on asking you first since it's been so long I (rightly) got kicked off the contributors' list. Poland's Prime Minister (the twin without the mole) is in the States today or tomorrow, so there's some ready-made material for an RR post from your Poland-based soon-not-to-be-former contributor.

9/12/2006 02:02:00 AM  


Blogger Redneck Texan said...

Sounds good.

I bet I can count on one the day after the mid-terms as well. ;-)

9/12/2006 06:06:00 AM  


Blogger Redneck Texan said...

which I wish both teams could lose.

Did I mention I have a wee bit of Irish in me. ;-)

9/13/2006 05:33:00 AM  


Blogger Gustav said...

Yeah, I'm not really looking forward to this week's game. I'm pretty sure the rebuilding Wolverines are going to disappoint. Just look at these scores from last week:

#10 Michigan 41 - (non-ranked) Central Michigan 17

#4 Notre Dame 41 - #19 Penn State 17

When the number 4 team beats the number 19 team by the same score as the number 10 team beat a non-ranked nobody, that tells me there's a big divide between 4 and 10 (now 2 and 11).

Still, hope springs eternal.

Bet you're shaking in your cowboy boots over that exciting matchup this weekend with Rice, eh?

9/13/2006 10:30:00 AM  

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