Axxlog

After nearly three years of postings on two different servers, Axxlog, the Media Access Weblog with the Vaguely Risible Name, closes up shop.

But, my opponents and detractors, wait! The news isn’t all good.

I’m simply switching everything over to my personal Weblog. I had originally separated the two Weblogs because I wanted to maintain the illusion of some professional/personal distinction. Really, that boiled down to “On my personal Weblog, I can be as gay as I want and I can swear as much as I want.”

After one contretemps too many with genteel homophobes in the broadcasting industry, I simply give up. And as for swearing, I’ve managed to do it onstage twice in the last year and it hasn’t hurt me any, so really, [expletive] ’em if they can’t take a Joe. Whether you’re reading me or hiring me, you’re getting the whole package. And no, I won’t make a pass at somebody in your office or run through George Carlin’s list of cusswords while I’m there. Give me some credit.

In addition, the name Axxlog has simply become too risible.

Follow along at home

But the news just keeps getting better!

If you have an RSS reader – and really, who doesn’t? – you can subscribe to posts from the personal Weblog on accessibility-related topics and never see anything else. As far as you’ll be concerned, I’m a happily-married Mormon who thinks Mickey Mouse is a racy and unhealthful influence for his many blond children.

1. Accessibility (in general) & feed
2. Captioning & feed
3. Audio description & feed
4. Subtitling & feed
5. Dubbing & feed
6. Web accessibility & feed
7. Cinema accessibility & feed

Not all topics have actual postings yet.

Thanks, Matt!

I express my gratitude to Matt Müllenweg for hosting Axxlog in its hour of need. Since cool URLs don’t change, all the links you have come to know and love over the last three years will continue to work indefinitely.

Along with new hosting, I’m also altering the mandate, if not the risible name, of Axxlog. I will now actually also discuss Web accessibility! I can’t believe it either.

Back in the day, another of my egregiously-neglected Weblogs, the Web AccessiBlog, covered that topic, but it became too difficult to maintain. Who knows? Maybe we’ll convert ’er to WordPress later. But from time to time, right here in these new pages, I will occasionally cover what’s new in Web accessibility. Something I hope to actually get going is a feature entitled “This Week in WCAG,” in which I summarize whatever people post (top-post, top-top-post, etc.) on the WAI-IG and WAI-GL mailing lists. That may be too much to do, however.

In fact, this entire addition may be too much to do.

I’ll get this in the sidebar shortly.

Writer

Joe Clark

Software and hosting

Matt Müllenweg, WordPress

Graphic design

Noel D. Jackson (authorized reuse of his PhotoStack design)

Hello, good evening, and welcome to the nouvelle formulation Axxlog, now hosted at the home of young Matt Müllenweg’s standards-compliant Weblogging software, WordPress. Did you know that 19- and 20-year-old kids these days don’t sit around sniffing glue and speaking English in brutal Acadian accents, as they did in my youth? Now they write their own content-management systems.

I am perpetually behind on my “projects” (anything that doesn’t have a paycheque and a deadline attached to it tends to slide), and the difficulty of updating manual pages, as the old Axxlog site actually was, pushed me over the edge of procrastination well into abandonment. So I’m trying something more convenient. I’m doing what all the hip kids do. If this is a Weblog, let’s use Weblog software.

So all I can say is: Put away that pot of glue and learn to pronounce th!

Axxlog, the Media Access Weblog™, drew its first breath on 2002.04.15. Written by Joe Clark, the Axxlog has a vaguely risible name and covers the following fields:

• captioning
• audio description
• subtitling
• dubbing
• and now, Web accessibility

The original Axxlog was a seldom-updated Weblog that I manually created. As of February 2004, we’re using Matt Müllenweg’s WordPress software and hosting. You can expect much more regular postings.

Useful links

Original, prehistoric archives

2003

• January–June
• July–December

2002

• January–June
• July–December

Related sites

• Media access
• Cinema
• DVD
• Building Accessible Websites

Captioners’ jobs pages

• WGBH
• Vitac
• CaptionMax
• NCI
• SDI