I apologize for LiveJournal

When I first started thinking about using blogs for the new GTIs, I set up one in Blogger. It was easy to make and edit entries, and easy to modify the page. By comparison, LiveJournal is cloodgy. It is hard to figure out where to go to make stuff happen. For example, after it took me a minute to figure out where to go in Blogger to edit entries, I understood the logic and it was all easy. In LiveJournal, I still -- after several entries (some of which seem to have disappeared) -- have to work to figure out how to get from the actual blog pages to where I go to edit. And in Blogger I personalized my site -- totally, by editing the CSS files -- almost immediately. I can't figure out if I can do such editing in LiveJournal. I've picked a new 'theme' and colors, but the list where you change colors gives you no idea what it is really, that you are editing.

The only reason we are here is because of the friends feature. If we are to write about classroom events, without having to worry about students, then we need to have pages that are private. Sigh.

I hope the new grad students -- who very likely will be overwhelmed by all that goes with teaching for the first time or teaching a new class at a new school, with having moved recently to a far-away place -- will not feel that asking them to use this not-so-well-designed interface is an imposition. I think that -- I hope that -- blogging will be useful for people settling into all this newness.