Blogspot is still not displaying photos efficiently. This site always had a quirky approach to photos--the page I see claims that I have some choice over whether they appear in the center or on the left or right of the screen, but in reality I've never had any control of that. Now it has a discouraging tendency to fail to display photos at all. Obviously this web site is not going to be featuring photos of America's most photogenic adoptable pets for a while.
But I have been nagging Petfinder, as I hope youall have been doing to, and I have seen enough improvement there to be able to say that the Petfinder links will return...in my Tuesday Revue newsletters.
For those who came in late: Twitter has been trying to promise corporate sponsors "bigger reach" than individuals on Twitter, which of course is contrary to everything Real Twits used to like Twitter for, and Real Twits have been continuing to resist and complain in every way we can think of. Some people did a "Twitter boycott" one day. I keep blocking the "promoted tweets" and those who post them, and posting any product-unfriendly thoughts that come to mind. I've been shadowbanned. Yes! You're nobody until you've been shadowbanned on New Twitter! Bestselling authors, winning politicians, even artists and musicians get shadowbanned all the time these days. The bottom line, though, continues to be that Twitter is still treating the private people whose tweets people visit Twitter for as "low-quality" accounts. When I read my own Twitter "home" page I'll see all the latest tweets from, e.g., Amy, Carol, and Ellen, if they're the last few Tweeps whose pages I've visited this week, but I'm still having to go to their "profile" pages to see whether Barbara, Diane, Felice, Gail, and Hazel are still using Twitter. Like many Real Twits I really, really don't like having friends' tweets blocked just to keep our "home" pages full of corporate drivel, even after the only corporate accounts I've not blocked are those of the main news media I originally wanted to follow. It's very annoying. I do want to see the headlines from the Washington Post, but I also want to see the "low-quality" friends-only tweets with the photo of what Ingrid had for dinner last night and the terribly cute malapropism Jane's two-year-old uttered.
Enter a European company, originally based in Ireland but now with headquarters in Amsterdam, called Revue, offering to make it easy for Twits to read each other's content by e-mail. Currently there's no charge for anyone with a Twitter account to set up a Revue newsletter. Revue handles the mailing list so the newsletter compilers don't even see our correspondents' e-mail addresses; Revue promises not to spam people.
It would be possible to set up Revue newsletters to circulate all the "went to this restaurant with Tracy and this is what I ate and this is what Tracy ate" kind of tweets, among groups of friends who were interested in that. Probably some Twits are doing that. I didn't want to do that. I want to scroll through pictures of what people had for dinner on Twitter but I'm not sure that that sort of thing needs to be republished and recirculated in e-mail.
I also didn't want to go back to doing the weekly Glyphosate Awareness Newsletters because, although this may change, currently both Carey Gillam (US Right to Know) and Robert Kennedy (Children's Health Defense) are doing those, and since they have better photos and more professional newsletter production teams than I have I prefer to promote what they're doing rather than imitate it.
I would suggest this. If you follow Green sites and people, generally, there is currently an easy way to sort out the True Greens from the Poison Greens. All True Green sites, organizers, and organizations, and this includes Ralph Nader's USPIRG, yesss!, are currently working on Glyphosate Awareness. Not all private individuals who just blog about their own Green lifestyles are working on any public issues, because they're busy canning their garden produce and upgrading their solar water heaters, but if they work on public issues the good ones are working on Glyphosate Awareness. The ones who've sold out to George Soros and his Euro-socialist friends are ignoring Glyphosate Awareness and screaming about Al Gore's long-disproven hypothesis of "global climate change" or "global warming," according to which, as all adults should remember so well, Miami was supposed to have been underwater by 2010, and as Miami is still above water adults won't touch this theory with a ten-foot pole. But the young always want money and the Euro-socialists have bought a lot of influence on people who weren't reading newspapers in 2010. I don't blame these kids for being kids, nor recommend that you do. I merely state that their public work is not True Green and not likely to accomplish anything good for our environment.
Anyway, what I'm offering in the Revue is "GAN: The Fluff," the cute, warm'n'fuzzy, feel-good links that people used to read this web site and/or follow me on Twitter for. It won't be the same as my actual Twitter page, where there are a lot of retweets and links of mere tweets. The Revue will link to full-sized posts and web sites and feature categories like New Books from Favorite Authors, Poems & Songs, Funny Things, Nature and Phenology...and also Animals. This week we have cartoons selected by a bestselling author, a batch of book reviews (other than mine--I don't plan to link most of mine in Revue since you can already see them here), the Petfinder winners and more.
You can get the Petfinder feature in your e-mail on Tuesdays, free of charge. You'll see small pictures of the most photogenic animals in their category with links to their Petfinder pages. Petfinder is still a clunky site (some nagging remains to be done) but you'll need to open it only if you want to adopt one of the animals; their stories and small pictures will be in the Revue. You're positively encouraged to forward the Revue to friends who might want be interested in the animals, and you're invited to nominate places (or even specific animals) you'd like to see featured as bonus Petfinder links.
I don't know how Revue is going to work out but, so far, it's working very nicely for those of us who are circulating our first few issues to one another. No spam, newsletters open easily, links work. Revue has the potential to be tremendous fun.
If you'd like to get the Petfinder links and other pleasant things in your e-mail on Tuesday morning, click here to subscribe: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/priscillaking2020 .
And, if you want to see my uncensored Twitter feed, or display yours for your friends? There are several blog hosting sites that can be automatically synced with Twitter to display all of your tweets in one place. Live Journal, where my shadow blog address is cat_sanctuary.livejournal.com, indexes them by time and date so you don't have to scroll back through seven years of tweets to find the older ones (which by now include several vital Glyphosate Awareness links). It's a diabolically effective way to subvert Twitter's hateful "low-quality accounts" filter. I love it.
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