Link Banana

Abigail Haddad is an excellent contrarian:

Organic food has garnered an extraordinary amount of attention from the media and, along with “local” food, is a darling of foodies and environmentalists, who talk up its civic virtues and benefits to the environment. There’s just one problem with this: agriculture has moved away from small-scale, local, and organic farming because these types of farms are land- and labor-intensive and don’t do a very good job of feeding lots of people. In addition, they are not definitively better for the environment, and their growth would lead to higher food prices than most Americans are willing to pay.

Some more practical points:

If you drive to your local farmers’ market to buy a few items from a farmer who has driven a truck several hours to be there, the number of food miles is relatively small; but compared to conventional agricultural products, the efficiency of each food mile is much lower.

If you drink organic milk, you may picture happy cows wandering in fields full of grass; but in fact, as Michael Poll[a]n discussed in his 2001 New York Times article “Behind the Organic-Industrial Complex,” it’s more likely your organic milk came from cows that spend their days in lots, eating grain and attached to milking machines—just like conventional cows.

I’ve been fiddling with the site recently. You may have noticed. Mostly it means that I’ve made most things a tad smaller and thus more compact. Thanks to that, I’ve taken the opportunity to increase the number of posts visible on the front page. Currently, that only means there are 15 (up from 10) but I may increase it more.

The other thing is that now when I forget the link on a post — something I do far too often — the title text will be visibly different (as is intentionally the case with this one). Hopefully this means that such errors will be corrected much faster, but I can make no guarantees.

If you ever notice anything that’s broken or wrong or just requires commentary, please use this form.

In addition to upgrading to WordPress 2.5 yesterday, I also added related content links to the site’s entries. It’s done using the Similar Posts plugin by Rob Marsh — who happens to be a Jesuit, a fact I find fascinating.

For now they’re only visible on the single-entry view, but if you’re ever bored you can click around and find a cornucopia of things you either missed or forgot. I, the sole writer and editor of this site, have spent a few hours finding stuff I’d already forgotten about. For a site that turns three months old tomorrow, my mind should be thoroughly embarrassed about that fact.

Also of note: I made a single massive list of every single post available as a way to view the archives. I should tell you that the sight is not for the faint of heart.

I finally got around to making this site’s feed (it’s this post’s title link) work a little better. I’ve configured it so that you don’t have to click through to this site to visit the pages I’m linking to. They’re now in your feed reader right under the title — right now the link has the clever text of “Title Link.”(see below). This doesn’t work exactly as I’d like, but it works significantly better than it did, which is certainly a good thing. I also have to thank Justin Tadlock for providing the impetus for finally making this work.

EDIT: I’ve changed it so that the title link has the same text as the title (though it obviously links to a different place). Though this still isn’t quite what I want, it’s the same result as one gets with Tumblr, which makes it at least a little more acceptable to me.

This might be interesting to some people, but probably not many. When choosing how Link Banana would work, I thought hard about using the popular Tumblr. The post I’ve made over at Ikiru Design gives a quick-and-dirty rundown of the major differences between Tumblr and WordPress, as well as a brief discussion of why I chose WordPress.

A perfectly good question. And the answer is: I don’t know.

But I do know that Link Banana is my just-born link blog. I also know that the name was chosen because I have a penchant for odd and off-the-wall names for otherwise serious thing. Probably the clearest — though certainly not only — example of this is that my longer-form blog which is called “Frozen Toothpaste.”

And as that name came like a random shot of lightning at sometime in the past (I don’t remember the moment or day), this one did too. Though I would say that this time I was holding the longest metal rod I could get my hands on. If I had to guess I would say the name came while I made banana bread on this first day of 2008. And it’s coming saved my from naming this “Worth a Link” — an accurate but boring title for this link blog.

I should probably explain what I mean by “link blog,” as the term has little pedigree or precedent. To me, a link blog is not unlike a “tumblelog,” but it is less varied in look and content. The chief content of a “link blog” is, well, the links. Hence, they’re in the title of each “entry.” Probably the purest example of what aesthetic and content you’ll see here is a look at Daring Fireball’s Linked List, though the content will be rather different than that. After all, we’ll be playing with my preferences and sensitivities, not John Gruber’s.

In any case, because Link Banana is a nascent and untraditional blog, some things don’t work quite right yet. This site’s RSS feed is still formatted like the WordPress default, which mean you’ll have to click through to follow any link I proffer. So too is the archive and commenting system not quite as I’d like. And the look will probably be see revision sometime soon.

But if you can accept all those flaws (and I hope you will) please enjoy the content that will soon be on offer from Link Banana. And I wish you a beautiful 2008.