When I dropped Netscape and moved over to using only IE, I basically gave up on all my bookmarks. IE’s favorites are not as convenient (the one edge they have over Netscape is that they can have site-specific icons. Big deal), their terrible management dialog makes them hard to reorganize, they’re a pain in the butt.
Anyway, I’ve found I mostly visit a small number of sites with easy-to-remember URLs, so giving up bookmarks wasn’t too bad. And if I find a link that’s nice to have around somewhere, I post it to this weblog (or to the forum) instead of bookmarking it.
But there are some sites which I simply lost track of as a result of the move. For example, I used to read a few online Journals. I stumbled across them when looking for details on the Clarion SF writers’ workshop, and continued reading the non-Clarion entries regularly. Like weblogs, journals are a tight-knit community, and you can link-hop (browse) from one interesting journal writer to another.
I still occassionally visit CJ Silverio’s journal, which has an easy to remember domain name and I also used to read Ron Collins’ site, www.typosphere.com. Silverio posts infrequently now, but she’s fun to read when she’s not expounding at great length about baseball. In addition to being interesting and intelligent, she also has a very American upper-middle class arrogance which allows the reader to feel smuggly superior while reading about her enviable life (well, enviable to this geek, anyway). I admit Ron Collins is less fun for me to read, since he comes across as such a perky and energetic Ned Flanders-like figure.
Someone whose online journal I haven’t read in a long while is Diana Rowland. I first came across her Clarion diary, but she has an engaging style which made me stick with her journal. It’s a bit like following a daily soap with a cast of one (yes, she writes about other people, but she’s pretty solitary and the journal reflects that).
Anyway, when I started reading Diana’s journal, she was a divorced Casino worker who wanted to write SF. When I checked on her after a long break, she had joined the Police, and when I went there today, I discovered she’s taken up bodybuilding seriously. The entry I just read describes flowers blooming in her garden, trainer school, progress on the bodybuilding front, a little self deprecation about her lack of a social life, and confronting a father whose 20-year old son had shot himself in the head (with a little reflection on the differences between various self-inflicted suicide wounds).
Best of all, she seems to show no real interest in Baseball or other obscure American team sports.