The Flow of Consciousness

The most recent change to my blog theme is one which most of my readers will never see. I added a print media CSS style sheet to all pages on the blog. Go on, try it. Use your browser’s “print preview” function to see it.

Rarely do folks actually print a post from someone’s blog. If it is a blog which does see some kind of readership with an unusual habit for printing articles, e.g. a blog about education which professors frequently print and distribute to their students, then the author or designer usually provides a “print preview” link or the printing user simply deals with the output, however many extraneous pages it may be.

However, accessing this printable version, that is, a version that prints without advertisements or colorful site paraphernalia, requires that the user click on a certain location, an extraneous action often neglected by visitors in a hurry.

This most recent change came about when I actually did have a reason to print one of my posts, and I realized that I wasted approximately five pages of paper just to get a small post. Now, I could have easily specified a page range when printing, but who does that? Users want to click print and have the article in hand.

I hate wasted paper, and most sites use some kind of div as a constricting container for the body text of the site. These containers often occupy less than the width of a page of paper, so the content fills only a portion of the paper, rather than letting the browser decide the width of the text on the printed page.

Print media style sheets remove this extra action and allow the designer of the site to decide how the printed output of a site should look.

The WordPress Codex’s Styling for Print article mentions five key element IDs which are generally a part of every theme:

1. #header
2. #content
3. #comments
4. #sidebar (or #menu)
5. #footer

These elements, and their children, are the ones that need to be customized to give a WordPress blog a printable look.

One can append his or her new print style sheet to the bottom of style.css using the @media print{} enclosure, or editing header.php and adding a whole new line, like I did. I prefer to have a separate file for easier code maintenance.

The most key part of my print.css stylesheet is the part which hides elements which have little use in a printed copy of any page of my blog.

#sidebar, #headerad, .search, #hmenu, #content .navigation,
#footer, #respond, #commentform, embed {
    display:none;
}

This is a screenshot of my Blogger Health Insurance article so you can see my blog design even if you’re viewing this in a feed or on a mobile device.

I used Ubuntu’s built-in PDF printer to produce these two print-outs of the site: one with the print style sheet, and one without it.

• Blogger Health Insurance article print-out UGLY
• Blogger Health Insurance article print-out PRETTY

Open both of those PDFs side-by-side and follow the comparison table with me.

If you look at this post in Print Preview, you’ll see a message in the code block. My print format truncates after 80 characters (I think). While this is usually not a problem, since my code blocks are generally meant to be copied and pasted instead of typed, I decided to include a short message at the top for browsers which support :before on elements in CSS.

Designing a decent print style isn’t very difficult. That very simple design took me just short of an hour. That hour of time infinitely increased the readability of printed copies of my blog, and completely eliminates the need for any kind of “printer friendly” link within the article metadata. Visitors to my blog who are so compelled to share my articles via sneakernet and hard copy won’t have to waste paper or ink printing unnecessary parts of the site design and can focus on what they want the most: the article text.

Check out the Styling for Print article at the Codex for more information and tips. Also, check out my print style using Print Preview and tell me if it doesn’t work for you!

For many, many years, my blogs have been called “The Flow of Consciousness,” an allusion to the stream-of-consciousness type of story-telling I enjoyed in high school. My first blog was actually called “Sojourns into the Life of Rinisari.” It was a Blogger blog, but I wrote maybe five entires because I didn’t have anything to write about in 11^th grade.

When I went off to college, I started a blog and called it The Flow of Consciousness because it was meant to be done in the stream-of-consciousness style. I never quite accomplished that, and it instead became a typical blog: moaning and groaning about college classes, romances, and life in general. It was hardly something I’d want the professional world to see.

The next evolution was a LiveJournal blog. Most of my college friends had LiveJournal accounts, and the friends page feature helped them corral all their friends’ entries in a single location. I wanted my friends to read my blog, so I started cross-posting to the old blog, based on Microblogger, and my LiveJournal blog. The LiveJournal blog was more mature, but it was still not something to which I’d like to be professionally attached. What’s posted there is my work and my thoughts, and there’s nothing there which is public that I wouldn’t want my parents or future constituents to see.

The next logical progression of my blogging life is this blog, powered by WordPress. It is meant to be a professional-quality blog with well-written, prepared, researched posts and content which, if extended, I would mind having published in a magazine, newspaper, or book.

His dictis, it’s obvious that the name of the blog, The Flow of Consciousness, no longer fits the neither the style nor the content.

Regular readers, all three of you, will see that I’ve changed the subtitle. I added education and politics to the list of penchants. My blog has become very political lately, and it will continue to be so long as I continue to write. I added education because I have a feeling that I will probably write on education-related things whenever I feel like it.

Eventually, I may move the Linux-related posts to BIOS LEVEL and post all Linux-related HOWTOs and such there. I don’t know if I’ll actually do it, or when, should I decide to do so.

This brings me to the question of the moment: Should I change the title of the blog? If yes, to what should I change it? I’m the top Google result for “flow of consciousness” and “colinbloggen”, the Frakturedsounden Deutschsprachen nickname which some of my friends use when linking to my blog or referencing it.

The other thing I’d have to do eventually is change feed URLs. The actual URL of my blog won’t change, but it would be silly to keep my feed URL as http://feeds.cad.cx/TheFlowOfConsciousness when the name of the blog is no longer that.

To the more experienced bloggers who read my blog: have you ever changed the name of your blog? How did it affect your readership, at all?

Libel insurance for bloggers has existed for some time, either in explicitly-purchased libel insurance or through homeowner’s insurance. The association with the latter confuses me, but I guess it has to go somewhere. Eugene Volokh wrote about libel insurance for bloggers in July of 2007, and the Citizen Media Law Project added to it.

However, there doesn’t seem to be a widely-available, or even narrowly-available healthcare insurance for professional bloggers. I think most insurance companies would consider bloggers to be self-employed, but most bloggers don’t make enough money to afford self-insured premiums (with exceptions such as John Chow, who is Canadian and has social healthcare anyway, and Shoemoney).

Before I muse further, I must disclose that I am not a lawyer nor insurance agent, nor do I have a keen understanding of the insurance market. I have no affiliations with any insurance company, other than being a consumer of services. I am musing, here, folks.

Healthcare is expensive—approximately $12,000/year for the benefits which PA teachers receive. I’m sure this much higher for the self-employed, such as bloggers.

However, if a group of bloggers banded together to get a group rate for health insurance, that group would certainly get a lower rate. Think of it as a union for bloggers.

TechCrunch reported March 17 that trade magazine Blogger and Podcaster would be starting its own advertising network and offering “access to healthcare” to members of the network.

Exactly what level of healthcare provided wasn’t specified, with Blogger & Podcaster simply saying that “this is a big issue for bloggers/podcasters looking to leave their day jobs and go full-time.” Ultimately the devil will be in the detail but immediately every US based blogger who blogs for a living is going to want to look at whatever they are offering; even if it’s a basic healthcare package it’s a whole lot better than having no healthcare coverage in country that (unlike most of the rest of the western world) does not provide universal healthcare.

While this might work, it’s tied to being involved with an advertising network. Not all bloggers want advertising on their blogs, and those that do might prefer another network, such as Federated Media or TTZ Media, or even simple ones such as Google or Yahoo!.

What I propose is this: an organization of bloggers who sign an agreement to abide by a certain code of ethics and agree to link to the organization’s site so that others can join. The group—a non-profit—arranges health insurance coverage for members (prescription, hospitalization, dental, etc.). They pay less for group health insurance, which is sponsored by the organization and served by a major carrier (I would suggest one that is based from a university, such as UPMC) or a health savings account. They could maintain the insurance so long as they abide by the code of ethics and maintain that link.

If the organization really wanted it to spread, there could be some kind of affiliate marketing scheme to go along with it. If someone joins using your affiliate ID, then pays premiums for so many months, you get a month free.

If the group grew sufficiently large, it could even consider offering 401K or other niceties offered by traditional companies.

I suggest the name International Union of Bloggers or Union International of Bloggers, because the acronym “IUB” works in almost every language which uses the Latin character set, even though some languages would reorder the noun and adjective, thus making it UIB. It could “IBU” or “BUI”, as well.

There might be a non-profit in existence that could handle this, too.

Does this already exist? Or am I behind the times and/or out of the loop?