Thanks for the tips – but I’m sorry to reject most of them. Well, all of them. No offense. And again thanks for making the effort.

“Da Russophile was the name of your old blog. Now, it is both the archive of that blog on Sublime Oblivion, and the name of the category for current Russia-specific posts? Correct? And Sublime Oblivion is the name of the new blog and the name of the category for your non-Russia-specific, “future history” type posts. Correct?” – Right… but the old blog was seamlessly transferred to this WP blog, so the archive encompasses all the original blogspot writings as well as those I’ve done since. Right.

“Blog: I assume this is the same as “home?”” – assumed correctly

“Articles: self-explanatory enough, save for the url. http://www.sublimeoblivion.com/home/” – I’d change it but I’m afraid of breaking old links; besides, I want to create a proper home page once I’ve got more stuff up there. A slick page with feeds to the blog; list of articles; extracts from the book(s) I hope to publish; etc…

“Da Russophile : Right now it looks like the intro to a blog without posts. Which is confusing, because there’s also a “Blog” tab. Just make this a link to the old blog, with a brief explanation that Da Russophile was the name of your old blog.” – no point because the old blogspot blog is now horrible out of date (actually I’ve erased all the posts on it except the very last one which said I’m moving), and automatically redirects to sublimeoblivion.com anyway. I *want* that page to be an intro to the DR mission.

Proposed change to “* Da Russophile *2.0* (92)” – possible, but again the number of people who are actually aware that there was an old DR is diminishing relative to newcomers.

“When I click on the categories, or “blogs” the name of the site changes on the toolbar…” – don’t really understand the problem, I’m afraid. Surely its better to differentiate between different Categories for the purpose of easier bookmarking?

“Lastly, and really this is the only real user-friendliness issue I have, I just want to know what your latest writing is,…” – my latest writing is always at sublimeoblivion.com, regardless of Cats. The Cats are for people who are only interested in, say, my Russia writings but nothing else.

@Gregor,

I didn’t make those images myself. I got them from teh internets and creatively edited them with GIMP.

Agreed, now’s a horrid time to be writing a book about Russia or current affairs in general. The world is in a high state of flux and it may well be utterly obsolete by the time it hits the stores.

Still, great website. In Britain our media is almost like a Soviet construction where facts are (as Reagan said) ‘silly things’. I came across Da Russophile originally after reading Ed Lucas’s blog. This was when he was plugging his book. In The Guardian he wrote ‘capitalism is amoral verging on immoral’… portraying Putin as a hypercapitalist. Simultaneously he wrote a plug in The Times about how wicked Putin was for imprisoning Khodorkovsky.

As you correctly pointed out (I think) the most frustrating thing about the ‘Russophobes’ is that they have a very poor relationship to facts, and they rarely make falsifiable predictions. It is just ‘oh Russia is very bad, and the evil Vladimir Putin will continue his evil and destructive policies and suck the fertility out of the Russian people and evilly kill dissidents until Russia is destroyed. As it was supposed to have been in the 1990s, but anyway’.

So great work on providing so many interesting facts and statistics and giving the other point of view. But that aside… well, frankly I do find a lot of your computer generated ‘apocalyptic’ images cheesy. Sorry. I myself would not have the ability to make any. My own blog is just an assortment of miscellaneous rants.

Incidentally, speaking of friend Lucas, we Brits seem less keen on sorting out the problems of Eastern Europe now that it turns out a lot of our economy was based on buying America’s bad debt. Don’t know how his book’s doing.

Da Russophile was the name of your old blog. Now, it is both the archive of that blog on Sublime Oblivion, and the name of the category for current Russia-specific posts? Correct? And Sublime Oblivion is the name of the new blog and the name of the category for your non-Russia-specific, “future history” type posts. Correct?

It’s your blog, and if it works for you, people can adapt, I’m sure.

If you really want tips:

~The header of your blog is Sublime Oblivion. Let us call this the name of your blog. Ok. Your blog has a name. Taken care of. (Your name is Anatoly Karlin. You have a name. Taken care of.)

~At the top of your blog are tabs for:

Blog: I assume this is the same as “home?”
Articles: self-explanatory enough, save for the url. http://www.sublimeoblivion.com/home/
Da Russophile : Right now it looks like the intro to a blog without posts. Which is confusing, because there’s also a “Blog” tab. Just make this a link to the old blog, with a brief explanation that Da Russophile was the name of your old blog.
About: Brilliant.
Contact: fine

~In the middle of the blog, Sublime Oblivion, homepage is

Sublime Oblivion Blogs
* Coffee House (22)
* Da Russophile (92)
* Life in General (7)
* Notes (2)
* Sublime Oblivion (19)
* Translations (2)

I’d change this to:

Categories:

* Coffee House (22)
* Da Russophile *2.0* (92)
* Life in General (7)
* Notes (2)
* Sublime Oblivion (19)
* Translations (2)

~When I click on the categories, or “blogs” the name of the site changes on the toolbar and browser tabs and the header on the screen (ie, …I know). So that is confusing. I should be able to tell if I already have Sublime Oblivion open if I’m at another site. And when I’m reading Sublime Oblivion, it should be reflected in the address bar, on the tab open, etc. Right?

~Lastly, and really this is the only real user-friendliness issue I have, I just want to know what your latest writing is, regardless of category or wither it is a blog post or article. You know? All of that should be on the Sublime Oblivion FP, home page.

Of course, if you were to do all this, my own oblivion would not be so sublime.

It’s still up in the air. Changing themes would take a day or two of intensive work; I could just install a “featured post” plug-in instead. We’ll see.

@Paul,

Thanks to you for adding me to your blogroll.

@poemless,

My original blog was Da Russophile, at blogspot. However I wanted to write more than just about Russia, so I moved to self-hosted WP and created Sublime Oblivion, and imported all the old Da Russophile posts.

But as you can see from the sidebar, Sublime Oblivion is actually a kind of parent blog:

“Sublime Oblivion Blogs

* Coffee House (22)
* Da Russophile (92)
* Life in General (7)
* Notes (2)
* Sublime Oblivion (19)
* Translations (2)

Da Russophile focuses on Russia’s economy, demography and the Western media’s biased coverage of it.

Sublime Oblivion is my project to identify key current trends – growth, Moore’s Law, global warming, resource depletion – to vision the future, in my upcoming book “Sublime Oblivion” for which I’m currently making Notes.

Coffee House is about economics, politics, philosophy, and other intellectual stuff.

Life in General and Translations is self-explanatory.”

The reason I switch between DR and SO, is quite simply because I’m not sure what it’s better to call myself in discussions. On the one hand when discussing Russia the DR is more relevant, and has wider name recognition. On the other hand I acknowledge people can get confused by seeing the name DR, going to my site and seeing SO on the header instead.

So as of about a few weeks ago I decided to stop posting as DR at all other blogs and shift fully to SO.

Sorry about the user-unfriendliness. Could you please give some tips about how I could remedy this?

(When ranking these blogs I of course gave SO’s user-friendliness a high rating, since I did say it was a “100% subjective list” ).

It’s very disorienting. I always feel lost, not even knowing which blog I’m on. I click on Sublime Oblivion and end up at Da Russophile. I click on Da Russophile and end up at Sublime Oblivion. Like I’m being volleyed back and forth between parallel universes which appear identical to me, and yet, they are distinct.

I give the design of the blog (which one? I don’t know…) a thumbs up for successfully recreating the experience of an existential crisis, but so far as “user-friendly” goes, I have to give you a FAIL. Sorry AK. Still one of my favorites, though. If it’s any consolation. Best “About me” page ever, too.