The blog now leaving from platform two…

Greetings.
I hope you all had a successful and hangover-free new year.
For myself, since boxing day I have been – and still am – suffering from a particularly virulent form of flu-like unpleasantness, coupled with a nasty chest infection.

I did attempt to go to work last week, on the first day back after the Christmas break, but I felt so dreadful that I came home after just three hours.
For the next few days I diligently drank plenty of fluids, ate all the right foods, and blanket-bombed the germs with cold remedies, decongestants and ibuprofen, all to no avail. If anything I felt even worse by the end of the weekend, finally giving in and going to the doctor on Monday to beg for antibiotics. He cheerfully informed me that there was indeed “something nasty going around”, managing to imply that any other details would be beyond my medically-untrained ability to understand.
Or maybe he just didn’t know.

Whichever it was, he wrote me a prescription for amoxicillin and gave me a week’s certificate for work, helpfully saying; “It would probably go away on it’s own after two or three weeks, but I expect you want to get better don’t you?”
Well, yes that’s why I came to see you, you’re a doctor.

Anyway, the result of this enforced house-arrest is that I’ve had nothing to do but sit under a blanket, alternately shivering and sweating, whilst reading or surfing the net on my new tablet.
You’d have thought that this would be an ideal excuse to knock out a whole batch of blog posts, but when it feels like someone has poured warm glue into your sinuses and stuffed any remaining space in your head with cotton wool, the creative process tends to grind to a halt.

By yesterday however, my brain – if not my other organs – had recovered sufficiently for me to attempt some sort of writing so
I took the opportunity to look into something I’d been interested in for a while.

There is a website that I’ve followed ever since I got myself online a few years ago called io9 (tagline; We come from the future) which posts daily updates on science, science fiction and fantasy, space and astronomy, and loads of culture and media stories in the same vein.
What I have always liked about the site are the discussion threads that accompany the articles, populated as they are by a community of quick witted, occasionally snarky and frequently very funny commenters.
I’ve always fancied having a go at commenting on the site and I have now discovered that in order to do so (and also to comment on other Gawker Media sites), one needs to register on a blogging platform called Kinja.

This is all new to me so I set up a profile – which was simple enough, logging in via my Facebook account – and straight away managed to start a discussion on an io9 post about upcoming sci-fi TV shows.

In case you’re interested, here’s the article I commented on. You may need to scroll through the comments to find my screen name (dalecooper57). To expand the whole conversation, click the little square icon next to the number of participants.

CLICK THIS LINK.

This alone gave me some considerable sense of achievement, internet novice that I am, but now I needed to investigate the blogging side of this new platform.
Their useful help section informed me that my blog profile would display the articles I commented on, along with any posts that I cared to publish myself. I assume that the only people who will see these posts will be fellow Kinja users who decide to follow me or people who click through to my profile via discussions that I comment on.

Having said that I also have you, my lovely readers to rely on.
So if this new side project takes off I shall post notifications on Diary of an Internet Nobody with links to my Kinja blog, in the same way as I have with previous guest posts for other blogs (apologies to Lanthie and Matt at Life Cherries and Ramblings of a semi-mad man, I’ve been neglecting my duties of late, I’ll get round to writing something for you soon)

So with that in mind, I’d like to share the first post on my Kinja blog, (which is currently self-titled) introducing myself to a whole new community.

May I present: In at the geek end…

Please take a look round the site and tell me what you think. (Sorry about the brain-frying gif at the top of the post, I did think better of it after posting, but I can’t work out how to delete it)

And if anyone has any experience of Kinja, any and all advice would be gratefully received.
Thanks.

[Logos taken from Google images and used without permission]