Who am I?

Good question. Let’s see: I’m a television producer, writer, columnist, debater, amateur photographer, GAD sufferer, hypochondriac, animal lover, chronic over-eater, game show fan, ISFJ-personality type, and Christian.

In no particular order.

What’s the next thing readers need to know?

What should be obvious: the opinions expressed in the posts are mine and no one else’s. I speak only for me, not my employer, or the people and corporations with whom I am professionally affiliated. The opinions expressed in comments are those of the individual writers and do not necessarily reflect my opinions.

Okay.  So how did you get here?

This is the third blog location I’ve tried in the four years I have been blogging. I began blogging on AOL. They call their blogs “journals,” and the bloggers who are part of that group refer to their blogging community as “J-Land.” When AOL decided to add banner advertisements to blogs without any notice, and without the courtesy of giving the bloggers any control or input about what was to be advertised on their blogs, some of us decided that it was a good time to find something new.

I went to Blogger, a service that I was largely happy with. I still like Blogger. In some ways, I like it better than any other blogging service I have found, and I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to start a blog but hasn’t tried, yet.

Such a glowing recommendation begs the obvious question: If I’m so pleased with Blogger, why am I now using a different service?

The answer is simple. Over the years, I started several blogs. There was “Patrick’s Place,” which was the primary blog, where I talked about everything from politics to news of the day to television and movies. Then there was “A Stop at Willoughby,” my blog about writing and the novel I’m writing. (It was named after my favorite episode of The Twilight Zone.) I created “Patrick’s Weekender” as the home of my regular weekly memes, the “Saturday Six” and the “Sunday Seven.” And “Patrick’s Portfolio” was where I would show off my limited photography skills. The last blog I started at Blogger was called “The Cross Examination,” a title I like a lot, that refers to the topic of that blog: religion.

Then one day I woke up and realized that I was one person with five blogs. It was difficult enough to keep one or two updated regularly. Three or four was really hard. Five is next to impossible. I decided that what I should do was to merge everything into one blog, so that no matter what I want to talk about, the blog itself is being updated. That way, none of my blogs — since I’d only have one — would ever go cold in want of a new post, unless I stopped blogging altogether.

Blogger, unfortunately, does not have an easy way to import posts from one Blogger blog to another. It was explained to me by a “helpful” moderator at one of Blogger’s help forums that the “easy” way around the lack of an automatic import would be to just copy and paste the posts from one blog to another. No problem, the moderator said.

Big problem, I said.

Copying and pasting doesn’t address comments where the posts originally existed. So I would have lost all of that interaction and discussion. And some of the blogs had more than 200 posts! Copying and pasting that many seemed like too much of an effort.

Wordpress, I discovered, can automatically import posts from Blogger and the associated comments. So now here I am, with one blog. All topics. No waiting.

Thanks for reading this lengthy explanation of what I’m doing here. I hope you enjoy the new Patrick’s Place.

What is your comment policy?

Maybe it is time I give an answer more detailed than what I’ve always said in the past: “Comments, if respectful, are always welcome.” So here goes:

I like comments. I read each one that comes in. Sometimes I respond, and I’m trying to get a little better about responding when applicable. I’m also trying to get a little better about trying to visit more regularly those bloggers who leave comments here. In any case, I, like everyone else who has a blog, likes getting feedback. Thank you in advance for any comment you choose to leave.

Comments that agree with me are always nice. I think we all like to know that what we think isn’t so far out of line with what others think. Some bloggers refuse to run comments that disagree with their post. I’m not one of those. I routinely run comments that disagree, in whole or in part, with something I have said. I try to encourage some discussion. And I’m the first to admit that my readers have made me rethink positions before. A few times, I’ve actually changed my mind about some position. That’s a pretty amazing thing.

Even the people who are usually on the same page I am will not agree with me on everything. There are a few people with whom I don’t really seem to agree on anything. But that’s okay in the blogosphere: if you and I always agreed with each other, this would get really dull really quickly. And neither of us want that.

So if you do leave a comment, I ask that you be respectful, whether you’re responding to me or another commenter. What does respectful mean? Different things to different people, to be sure. Try to avoid ad hominem attacks: they accomplish nothing other than to show that your own argument is pretty weak. Try to respond to what you actually see, not what you think you see between the lines. We all have learned by now, surely, that sometimes words in print do not translate quite the way they would if you were hearing someone speak them. If you’re not sure what a person means, it’s probably good to at least offer the benefit of the doubt.

I do moderate comments. The main reason for this is to keep spammers from advertising Viagra, porn, or both on my blog. Of the comments that I actually reject, about 98% of them fall into the spam category. For the remaining two percent, I reserve the right to reject comments that are abusive, full of foul language (if you can’t say it on daytime television, it probably won’t get posted here), hate-filled, or based on ad hominem attacks. If I feel that a comment is libelous or contains accusations that I cannot immediately confirm, I’ll drop those, too. I also don’t post comments that have nothing to do with the topic they’re posted under. And those “psuedo-comments” from people who compliment me and leave a link to their site, when it’s clear that they never bothered to actually read what I wrote, won’t be approved, either.

I have specified here that one need not register with Wordpress to be able to leave a comment. I didn’t want to impose on anyone to have to remember yet another username/password combination. The comment form itself is quite simple: you only need to enter your name (screen name is fine with me if you prefer), and a valid email address (which isn’t posted). If you like, you can leave a link to your blog, if you have one. (If you’re playing one of the weekend memes, you might want to leave the link to the specific post in that URL window, or leave it in the body of the comment.)

So that’s probably it. Make sense?