Reflections From a Murky Pond

Recently I published a post, which I’ve since deleted. It was quite an angry post because I was quite angry when I wrote and published it. In point of fact, I’m still angry about Julian Assange’s and Wikileaks’ behavior and their willingness to harm, or potentially harm so many people.

That’s not likely to change any time soon.

The problem is that I went too far in my rage and suggested methods of uncovering Julian Assange that went outside the pale of acceptable rhetoric. Doing so hurt some people and angered a great deal more people. For both the hurt and the anger please allow me to tender my apologies.

For that I’m sorry.

Some will now say that I’m apologizing because they believe that they can do me harm. That’s actually sort of true. The effort people have went to in order to attempt to do me that harm showed me more than anything else how hurt and angry they were – and none of them that I know of were people I was angry at myself, so they were, to my mind, all innocent collateral victims of my anger.

For that I’m truly sorry.

I’ve also gone to great and very creative but less than empathic or completely ethical pains to separate my digital persona from my real life. This has resulted in some erroneous beliefs about who I am and may well result in further innocents being inconvenienced, harassed, or harmed in some fashion since the anger of the responses has reached levels even beyond what I showed.

For that I’m truly sorry as well.

Daniel Assange deserves my apology perhaps more than anyone else, but I don’t really want to drag him back into something that I never should have drug him into in the first place, so I won’t belabor that point and risk drawing him back into this.

~*~

It would be both pathetic and hypocritical for me to expect anyone’s forgiveness but those that were harmed or angered needlessly still deserve this apology to accept or spurn as they choose.

Facebook Integration

Reflections From A Murky Pond is now integrated with Facebook.

Readers can now log into this blog with their Facebook account and can publish their comments on their Facebook profiles as well as on Reflections From A Murky Pond, if they so wish.

Facebook users’, when logged in, will also now display their Facebook profile picture with their comments instead of either their Gravatar or the blog’s default commenter image.

I have also – with the great help of the WordPress plug-in, WPBook – created a Facebook Application that allows bidirectional integration and synchronization between Reflections From A Murky Pond and Facebook. Now both posts and comments from the blog will show up in the application on Facebook and comments made within the Facebook application (http://apps.facebook.com/murkypond) will also appear in the blog itself.

The application creates a small box in the Facebook users’ profiles that presents the headlines for Reflections From A Murky Pond’s five(5) most recent posts.

Application Widget Screenshot

Clicking on any of the headlines will take the Facebook users to the full application where they can view the post and its comments, and also comment themselves if they so choose.

I’m hoping that this will facilitate a greater reach for the blog and an easier means of communication and commenting since so many of us are on Facebook these days.

Significant Upgrade

Reflections From A Murky Pond has been upgraded to WordPress 2.9 as of 9:00 EST, December19, 2009.  It has also been migrated to a MySQL 5 database since WordPress 2.9 does not support the MySQL 4 version that Reflections From A Murky Pond had still been using.

Version 2.9 is a significant upgrade to the WordPress blogging platform and I highly recommend it to self-hosted bloggers using WordPress.

Issues & Outages

I’m afraid that Reflections From A Murky Pond suffered a severe software problem. This resulted in the loss of some posts and comments.

Thank you all for your patience, and my apologies for any inconvenience.

iPhone & iPod Touch Support

Reflections From A Murky Pond now supports iPhone and iPod Touch usage. The blog has been augmented to a customized response to those devices’ Safari browsers.

Thank you all.