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 lot of church bulletins or lost-dog fliers. Keep on using Word.

…For most people now, though, publishing means putting things on the Web. Desktop publishing has given way to laptop or smartphone publishing. And Microsoft Word is an atrocious tool for Web writing. Its document-formatting mission means that every piece of text it creates is thickly wrapped in metadata, layer on layer of invisible, unnecessary instructions about how the words should look on paper. I just went into Word and created a file that read, to the naked eye, as follows:

[very long string of meta-data garbage]

The whole sprawling thing runs to 16,224 characters. When I dumped it back into Word, it was an eight-page document. Online publishing systems gag on this stuff; gremlins breed in the hidden spaces. Some publishing platforms have a built-in button especially for pasting text from Word, to clear away the worst of it, but they don’t work very well. Beyond the invisible code, there are those annoying typographical flourishes—the ordinal superscripts, the directional quotation marks, the automatic em dashes—that will create their own headaches in translation. Multiple websites exist simply to unmangle Word text and turn it into plain text or readable HTML.

The whole thing is here.  Others agree with me.

Thank you for letting me get that off my e-chest. You may now go back to your regularly scheduled conversation. Life should let up a bit soon and I’ll be ready to jump back in to the fray.

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 real-world impact.” And this is true. I kinda think of blogging as the grown-up equivalent of a child projecting his voice into a box fan set to HIGH and listening to the distortion. Or maybe that was just me as a bored kid finding ways to pass the time in a single-wide trailer on a rock-holler farm in the Ozarks.

In any case, it wouldn’t be too much to say that the community of conversation and candid camaraderie that’s taken hold over the years around here has irrevocably changed me as a writer and a thinker - transforming my view of myself, the music, and the various modes of relating to it that co-exist. Plus, like a younger me talking into a fan on that farm in the faraway foothills of Missouri, it’s just plain fun. Thanks for seven great years.

Onward into Blog Year 8.

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 don’t want to say anything on here that could hurt anyone or come back to affect me. In the end, if you pay attention to the posts that will follow, your chances of having an artist enjoy your company or not try to avoid you will improve.

A curious, if not altogether surprising, approach, this decision to frame the blog as an effort to equip fans with some information that might help them be less obnoxious to artists. This is a polite way of saying “this won’t be Jersey Shore for sg” and, to be sure, such an approach will certainly appeal to a certain subset of diehards who are ever on the lookout for tips about how to more effectively practice their fan-love on their favorite artists.

Still though … while censuring whole swaths of what life is really like for an artist in the name of not being “negative” makes perfect sense from a job security perspective, it will make for a lot less interesting blogging, I imagine. Here’s my prediction, anyhow, gleaned from very personal experience: the blogger’s ability to remain anonymous will vary in direct proportion to the blog’s candor about life on the road (and how savvy the tech set-up on the blog is in the first place).

In the meantime, there’s a lot to be said from an artist’s perspective that would be worth reading before we all get to the forbidden forest of negativity. That, and, the bar on artists’ blogs has been set pretty low by the most of the ones that are out there so far.

So, yeah … welcome, FAAP. Oh and … yes, a less clunky nom de blog would be nice too … I recommend putting your interns on that.

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 something could be done. I used to really look forward to coming here. Now, I almost always regret it when I look at the comments. [snip] The intellectual level of the discourse has fallen somewhat.

Ah the good ole days!

And another:

I find it ironic that those who don’t like this blog are driving away those of us who do. I’m so tired of every topic becoming a name-calling, who-can-outtrash-the-other free-for-all. If you can’t stick to the topic, and add something substantive, please go away. Find another blog to misuse for your own satisfaction. You sound like preschool children. Enough! Some of us appreciate Doug’s insights and critiques.

Thanks for the kind words.

Still another reader finds more madness than method in my moderation:

It’s just difficult sometimes to gauge what’s “safe” and acceptable on your site and what’s not.

These are not new problems, either for readers or writers online, though some are more easily handled than others. The problem of what’s safe to post and not is, for me, usually (though not always) less difficult than the question of how low to let a conversation go. The comments in which posters seem deaf to  the irony of using my forums to demand my silence may be self-discrediting, but they’re also an essential plot point on the continuum of worldviews and perspectives that shape common approaches to gospel music and culture. Name-calling makes me uneasy, but then again, life ain’t all patty cakes either. Most scatological references pretty consistently put me off (comment comparing build around extended bowel movement metaphor? DELETE!), except of course, when they don’t. I trust you get the point.

The trash-talking, lowest-common-denominator, race-for-the bottom tendencies of many comments threads leads some bloggers to ban comments as a matter of principle. Andrew Sullivan:

[T]his blog tries to air debate by reading and editing the smartest reader contributions and trying to moderate them a little to provoke and advance or clarify the conversation. [snip] A little dorm room conversation in one’s later years is worth doing - and blogs, if they’re edited and curated well, can help.

In theory I’m on board with this. And of course I wish the comments here drifted more toward the thoughtful and engaging rather than slightly less in the direction of the bombastic and self-righteous. But in the context of averyfineline (and aside from the time commitment it takes to sift and sort emails a la Sullivan, who is a paid, professional blogger with real-live interns to handle mail and research), I’ve given this a lot of thought (and continue to do so regularly) and keep coming to the conclusion that in southern gospel culture, where most healthy dissent is culturally stigmatized and forced consensus often distorts issues and oversimplifies the range of viewpoints in play, freer-flowing conversation that tends toward bombast and santicomony is better than the altnerantive, even if this approach runs the risk of more being less in some cases.

Anyway, the usual disclaimers about tuning your ear to the academic frequency and remembering that we get paid by the syllable etc all apply. I always try to pass along copies of my articles to people who show up in the acknowledgments, and this case, that means you. Thanks again. And Happy New Year.

Update: Here’s a much cleaner copy of the essay that’s now available on the journal’s website.

The idea here is that for those of you who just can’t wait for my late-night post-facto reports on avfl, you can use Twitter to get some off the cuff real-time updates from me throughout the evening at NQC that, as per the Twitter policy, do not exceed 140 characters, including spaces. So if you’ve ever wondered what shorter Avery looks like, Twitter may be your bag.

Thus, if I were to Twitterpate this post, it might look like this: I’m atwitter, you can twitter, be atwitter too, http://twitter.com/averyfineline. [With 34 characters to spare, thank you very much]

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 (Eric Reed’s Mercy and Grace project), questioned my own outlook on a number of issues…

 I’ve also the comments section of the blog as well but I’ve noticed a huge deterioration in many of the [commenters’] posts and I was wondering what your take on that is and if you have noticed it as well.  It really seems that many of posts are consistently showing a real lack of respect for the opinions of others.  Many posts start off sounding rather dogmatic and many of them end in near fistacuffs.  I guess I’m more surprised that many are so quick to react this way.  I know that if I could see many of the posts that got “edited” I would be even more surprised but it has gotten to the point that I’m actually able to gloss over many posts based on the writer (Wade, Harry etc.)  I know they are entitled to their opinions as well but they manage to offend, hurt and bring people down so quickly that it becomes a waste of time to even read it.

 I’ll always read your blog quite frankly.  I’ve enjoyed countless posts of yours and I have honestly appreciated your insight on a ton of issues.  I guess I hope for better things to come from many of the other readers/posters.

 Keep on writing, screening and editing.  The SG world needs this.

I didn’t ask for anniversary presents, but this ain’t bad as gratifying responses from readers go.

But more to the point: yeah things do seem to be getting uglier in the comments lately. Hard to say what’s going on. Maybe the proportion of boneheaded comments to original, thoughtful, and interesting ones is no different than it ever was but that the increase in comment volume (in both senses of the word) has accentuated the loudest, crudest, most anti-social voices. Could be that more people are reading (they are, if traffic metrics are any indication), and so a certain strident bloc of commenters think the only way to be heard above the crowd is to shout and hector and badger and bait. Could be fewer people are reading (or commenting) and the place has gone to the trolls, die-hards, deadenders and lifers – in which case the spike in traffic would be registering an uptick in the number of times the same people log on (from different computers?) to keep flogging the same old stuff. Maybe it’s a general direction in comment quality afflicting more sg blogs than this one (DBM discusses “stupid comments” here, though I’m not suggesting two is a trend).

I don’t know. What I do know is that I’ve found myself more impatient of the numbskull posts, and more and more I have less and less trouble hitting the EDIT and DELETE buttons. I’m not sure that’s entirely a good thing, but it’s probably not all bad either. I’ve made this plea before and you see where it’s gotten me, but still … Less trolling and flaming, please. Honestly.

Perhaps needless to say, I couldn’t agree more with the comments about the SN’s deplorable web presence. The SN itself seems caught between two competing attitudes toward their new media operation: ignore it and hide it behind a subscription wall. For my part, though I still long for a real news site that does more than copy and paste press releases and cheerlead for the industry, my thinking has shifted, or evolved, with time to realize – even if I haven’t fully accepted it, if acceptance means being ok with it – that we’ve got exactly the kind of coverage of, and commentary about, sg that the market – that is, the southern gospel industry and audiences – wants and is willing to support. I was reminded of this when Salem, SN’s parent company, recently shut down the print edition of CCM Magazine. CCM fans don’t really care about print publications; they want a developed new media presence. Southern gospel fans, on the other hand, don’t really care about well-developed new media operations; they want a robust print edition that tells them reliably good news about their favorite artists, with lots of glossy pictures and comforting conclusions about the rewards of clean living and godly music focused on Christ and the cross in I-IV-ii-V7-I.I think we webheads tend to forget that we’re a statistically insignificant subgroup barely worth the status of “demographic segment.” I say “barely” only because there are a few signs that the industry is moving ever-so-slowly into the digital age. The SN is now publishing full editions online in addition to its web-only features. It needs work, but it’s a start. And Crossroads Music is starting to roll out some new web products, including most recently an e-store for soundtracks.

There are probably other things I’m forgetting, but I get the feeling these are more “build it and hope some day they will come” efforts than responses to pent up aching rivers of demand. Whatever the origins of these efforts, though, experience teaches us that most of these new media ventures will largely re-create the old ways of the industry’s business and publicity cultures – including the “praise report and prayer request” style of sg “journalism” – in new media formats.

Update: Thanks for all your emails and suggestions. With your help and Google I’m pretty sure my problem is a good one, insofar as nothing is “wrong” per se, just that my traffic is heavy enough and WP’s PHP infrastructure creates usage demands such that I’m bumping up against my ISP’s CPU limits (as opposed to data transfer limits, which hasn’t been a problem and shouldn’t be, as many of you point out). Soooo, after an evening of Googling and searching and reading deep in the bowels of virtual geeekdom, I’ve made some tweaks, namely uploading a plugin that WordPress gurus swear by (wp-cache) as a way to make my ISP’s CPUs think I’m running a static page. Ideally, this will show some results over the next few days and get me out of the leper colony and back into the good graces of my ISP. Stay tuned.

Later update: you may have trouble posting comments for a day or so while I sort out my server issues. Be patient. Things should sort themselves out soon enough.

Anyway, I’ve always assumed at some point I’d run out of things to say, and some days I come pretty close to taking a bow and heading for the bus. But then I find myself getting up on a sleepless night and pounding out three or four posts and getting that strange bloggers’ jolt of excitement and anxiety and expectation and fear and then I hit PUBLISH, only to wake up three or four times during the rest of the night to monitor my blackberry for a flame war or comments cat fight.

I blame you, naturally. You keep coming back, more and more every month (and evidently, a few artists read this site, … “more than you’d think,” to be exact, at least according to Madison Easter. Who knew?). Last month was the best yet: a total of 250,000 hits on the month, almost 4,400 daily page views, 2,500 daily visits (76,000 for the month), and 8,300 hits a day. Thank you.

As for reflections on the journey thus far, it would perhaps be overstating things to say blogging makes any kind of measurable difference, despite the most noble goals. At best, I think blogs offer an alternative site for free-wheeling discussion and open exchange of perspectives that might otherwise go unvoiced in a subculture like southern gospel, where the powerful and prominent come into their power and prominence assuming deference to their opinion as a kind of birthright.

But to value dissent and critique and give-and-take is not nothing. When I read on Adam Edwards’s site the other day that Libbi Perry Stuffle had created a line on her personal profile called “dislikes about gospel music on the internet” in order to take a swipe at “message boards and blogs,” I couldn’t help but feel like some of the gospel-music uses of the internet must be getting something right. Which is to say, the diversity of perspectives and ideas that blogs like mine thrive on mounts a regular challenge to the kind of monochromatic thinking implied in Stuffle’s remark.

Whenever I read or hear things like this (and if you listen closely, you might be surprised how frequently performers make left-handed remarks about the internet from the stage), I’m reminded of two things.

One is that southern gospel may hold the worldwide record for thinnest skin per square inch of professional epidermis. After Gaither, there is probably no other group that bestrides gospel music right now the way the Perrys do, and still the family matriarch thinks it necessary to go out of her way to twit what is – in the grand scheme – a comparatively small (but also very devoted) subset of fans in gospel music who prefer to maintain their connection to sg online and dare to say more than “you and your group is sech uh blessin’.” As a critique of new media, the remark is just silly (given the lack of influence or prestige we the pajama mafia of the blogosphere can claim); as a PR move, it’s counterproductive (if there’s one thing you can say about message boarders and bloggers, it’s that they are diehards, so why poke em in the eye?).

The other thing I’m reminded of: a little bit of dissent, critique, candor, and plainspeaking goes along way in the intellectually brittle world of southern gospel music. The joyful noisers will probably always be the prevailing attitude. But then again, that just means the rest of us will have that much more fun baying at the moon, sticking in a thousand craws, and generally insisting on the joyful-noise absurdity that what motivates an artist must be the only reason to care about or engage with an art form.