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Dear Everyone Who Was Kind Enough to Buy an Interesting Ticket
You will have had an email from eventbrite with the above text in it. It's quite near the bottom, not in large letters, so you can be forgiven for not noticing it. But please take a moment and notice it. You will not be receiving any form of printed ticket from me. Just the print out, that's all you need. Bring that along to the event entrance.
Bless you for your cooperation in this matter.
Just so you know.
I found this in a box the other day, it reminded me how much egg bacon chips and beans and a good place for a cup of tea and a think nag away at my conscience. Every time I think I've got to the end of my to-do list they sit there, accusingly, un-updated.
Realistically they're not going to be updated much any more. I still go to lots of cafes but they tend to be cafes I've already written up. I don't have a sufficiently peripatetic lifestyle to be adding new places all the time. Which I can live with; no-one's clamouring for new updates and when I do occasionally add a cafe, RSS handles the rest.
But what worries me is all the out-of-date content on there. Some of these places must have closed, improved, worsened, whatever, but my pages are still among the top hits for many of them, and the blog gives very little indication of how old the entry is. Certainly there's the date, but who looks at that? It's probably not enough.
Which, of course, is where print succeeds so well. If these blogs were on paper you'd instantly get a good clue how old the information is. Yellowing, brittle paper. A distinct smell. The only places these blogs should now show up should be second-hand shops and libraries - again giving you a sense of the age of the information.
I guess I should stick up a disclaimer of some sort but that seems too unsubtle.
Chatting with Mr Gyford we both thought maybe someone should build an agify service (rather like cornify) that would look at the date on a page and add coffee stains, curled up pages and other aging cues as appropriate. That'd be nice. Maybe it could even be a MT plug-in or something.
Anyway.