averyfineline

Especially if you try to use it to compose blog posts before pasting them into a web publishing interface like Wordpress, which this here little blog thingy uses with gusto. Money quote:
What makes Word unbearable is the output. Like the fax machine, Word was designed to put things on paper…That’s great if you’re making a […]

Thanks for all the happy blogbirthday wishes on Avery’s facebook page yesterday. This little experiment in southern gospel in the etherspaces turned seven yesterday.
A wise man has noted that, “Generally speaking, blogging is like shouting into a hurricane: it might make you feel better, but hardly anyone hears you and it rarely has any […]

That’s what the writer at anartistsperspective.com is trying to do with this recently launched blog, though with some mighty big carve-outs in the blog’s permissible field of vision:
I don’t intend for this blog to be negative in any way. I prefer to keep my anonymity for obvious reasons, but if it were ever discovered, I […]

Later this morning I’ll be giving a talk by that title at the NEA Higher Education conference (don’t worry, the confessions aren’t forced or coerced at all; in fact, they’re treating me magnificently, and this year the conference is in Portland, OR, which is officially my new favorite city). The presentation is about the convergence […]

Regular readers will know that since avfl added comments threads to posts, moderation is minimal, and/but a few readers think it’s time to reconsider that approach. Says one:
I realize that you don’t want to get too heavy-handed with moderating comments (I can understand that this might partly be due to time constraints); but I wish […]

A list of bloggerly whines for the new year to which I assent wholeheartedly, save for No. 9, since my math skills suck.

As promised, here’s the article I recently published that we were discussing earlier (and if you’re a Thought & Action reader just joining us, welcome). I am not unaware of the irony of an article about the internet age having to be scanned from paper and converted into a .pdf in order to appear online. […]

Reader (and twitterpater) RF weighs in here on the the avfl Twitter feed, and/but I’d like to hear from some others of you twitter readers. Is it worth the trouble? There are so far about two dozen “followers” signed up for the avfl feed. Are other people reading directly from the avfl Twitter page or […]

So the interns (and M and C) have convinced me to try Twittering NQC this year. I emphasize “try” because I’m only half-sure I know how this whole thing works (if you’re unfamiliar and want to jump in the deep end, try this as an explainer). Nevertheless, I gather that if you want to be […]

Longtime reader AG writes to Ask Avery:

I wanted to let you know how much I’ve enjoyed reading your blog.  As you know I’ve been reading it since you started it several years ago.  I’ve laughed at some of the posts, gone out and bought cds as a result of some of the posts […]

What separates them from the herd? Via Andrew Sullivan, Merlin Mann and Jason Kottke weigh in.

I must say, it’s gratifying – in a bittersweet kinda way – to see people finally starting to say some of the same things about the sad state of mainstream media in southern gospel that I’ve been saying for years now (in fact, one of the many ancillary but not unimportant reasons I started this […]

There’s a fascinating thread of comments from readers at Matt Yglesias’s blog about finding an ideal balance in blog postings. I know you’ll be shocked to here this, but I tend to write long and tedious blog posts, so I offer all this without amendment to reform. (I have to communicate with discipline and […]

So my ISP tells me that the the Wordpress PHP script on my index file is apparently causing excess CPU usage (I’ve been quarantined to a special server, evidently). I know next to nothing about these issues, so I’m wondering if any savvier technical minds out there than mine have some theories. Could it be […]

It quietly came and went a few weeks ago. I note it only fwiw, which varies wildly depending on whom you ask, of course. The usual stuff applies about what a great bunch of readers I have on the whole. A friend of mine emailed the other day to remark that the average intelligence of […]

Or maybe there won’t even be a table. I’m not sure, really. It’s all very hush-hush you know. But a bunch of bloggers and other assorted writerly types who post stuff about music that may or may not be related mostly to southern gospel are getting together at NQC to talk about some things. Chuck […]

So this kind of thing makes for great press release fodder … “Ernie Haase’s group is the first of its kind to use this newest form of video delivery technology.” And so on. But what’s the real payoff here? As far as I can tell, the EHSSQ media channel is a slickly designed email harvesting […]

Many of you were gracious enough to spend some time filling out a survey to help me better understand my readers, so I thought I’d pass along the results, now that they’re up (and yes, when I registered initially, I misspelled the site name as averyfinline, a mistake that seems to be etched in virtual […]

Southern Gospel Critique, a newish blog of mostly music appreciation, regularly finds and links to ebay auctions of sg and related styles of music (or sells off bits of his own collection). I’ve scored a few finds either from one of his links or from subsequent searches. If you’re an ebay/sg junkie, it might be […]

A hip friend of mine turned Averyfineline HQ onto Pandora, part of the Music Genome Project (the interns are also atwitter over the Roku, but that’s another story). The basic idea is that you plug in some of your favorite kinds of music or artists and Pandora custom builds an aggregating “station” that pulls music […]

So I’m probably coming to this hopelessly late, but something called the “internet radio equality act” was introduced today in the Senate in response to a recent move by the Copyright Royalty Board to significantly hike the fees that internet radio stations pay on the songs they play. I know just enough about this to […]

So this is pretty much off the top of my head and it may already be in place and I just haven’t seen it. But I’d love to be able to go to a radio station’s website, call up its play list, find the song I just heard that I liked or remember wanting to […]

Musicscribe is the place to go for coverage from sg of today’s big news about digital music provisioning. All I have to offer is a link to this commentary from PRI’s Marketplace radio show. I don’t know enough about the technology of ISPs and digital downloads to judge the feasibility of the plan the commentator […]

Songwriter Sue C. Smith laments the frustrations of unintentional quasi-identity theft in comments threads (ftr the blog she’s talking about is avfl, where she occasionally comments here as just “Sue”). Ah the curse of the common name.

Prologue: I brought back some kind of North Carolina head cold from the bloggers conference that has funkified me the last few days. Thus the lag in putting together some reflections on the meeting.
By now you’ve may had a chance to read other summaries of what went on at the Crossroads headquarters in Arden, […]