Minor Wisdom

Defining and quantifying wisdom

The title of this blog, Minor Wisdom, isn’t so much a promise as an aspiration. But what is wisdom? A couple of psychiatry professors at UCSD, Dilip V. Jeste, M.D., and Thomas W. Meeks, M.D.,conducted a study and published a paper about it. I don’t have a link to the paper itself, but here’s one to the UCSD press release. (Hat tip to Stephanie West Allen.)

Trying out a new design

I’ve done some remodeling here at Minor Wisdom. I re-arranged the layout to put both sidebars on the right side, so that the newest post will appear in the upper left corner—the first place people usually look at on a computer screen. To speed up page loading, I deleted a couple of things features from the sidebar. (If you miss them, let me know. If you don’t, that tells me they didn’t need to be there in the first place.) Finally, I installed a new design, a prefab by TypePad called “Minimalist Red,” which I’ve also installed at my other blog.

Retrospective

I thought it might be fun to look back at this year’s posts and highlight some of my favorites. I also thought that the exercise might give me a clue about exactly what the hell I’m doing with this blog (because frankly, I haven’t figured that out yet).

New tag line

A few years ago, I made a five-day silent retreat at the Jesuit Spirituality Center in Grand Coteau, Louisiana. At some point during the retreat, I read the Parable of the Prodigal Son. And I reached verse 20, and wept. Mainly because I see myself as “still a long way off.”

I still like my old tag line — the Yogi Berra quotation, “You can observe a lot just by watching.” But for now, the tag line here is the most beautiful line in the most beautiful story in the gospels.

Happy Anniversary (to me)

Three years ago, the blog now known as Minor Wisdom opened for business on TypePad. It was a continuation of a blog I started on Earthlink on May 10, 2004.

(Picture stolen from here.)

Testing the e-mail subscription feature

If all went well, I just added an e-mail subscription feature to this blog. This post is just a test of that feature.

Blidgets

When I started this blog, legal writing was its major topic. A little over a year ago, I decided to create a new blog, The (New) Legal Writer, devoted exclusively to legal writing. Ever since, I’ve been looking for ways to integrate that blog with this one — an easy way to cross-reference each blog’s posts on the other blog, so that any visitor to either blog can see what’s new on the other.

Today I found and installed a solution to the problem. Recently TypePad started promoting Blidgets, a tool for converting a blog into a blog widget or “blidget,” which in turn can be installed on another blog. The result: I now have a little box on Minor Wisdom displaying the headline and a snippet of each new post on The (New) Legal Writer, and a little box on The (New) Legal Writer displaying the headline and a snippet of each new post on Minor Wisdom. If the snippet interests you, click on the headline above it to read the full post.

If, like me, you’ve bifurcated your blogging and want to integrate your blogs’ content, visit Widgetbox, register for a free account, and play around a bit.

Legal-writing feed added to Minor Wisdom

Long-time readers of Minor Wisdom (all three of you) may remember that legal writing was one a frequent topic here. In January of this year, I started another blog, called the (new) legal writer; that's where all the legal-writing posts now go. Since then, I've been trying to figure out an easy way to cross-reference the legal-writing posts on both blogs. Solution: a TypePad feature that allows users to add an XML feed to their sidebars. Visitors to this blog will now see, at the top of the right-hand column, a list of recent posts from the (new) legal writer.

If you read Minor Wisdom via an RSS feed and you'd like to have the legal-writing posts delivered to your news reader, please visit the (new) legal writer, click on the subscription icon, and follow the directions.

Entering the terrible twos

Today is the second anniversary of this blog. It began on Earthlink under the title Rain Man, then moved to TypePad as Rain Man 2, later renamed Minor Wisdom, after the great Fifth Circuit judge.

Sorry, no more trackbacks

With regret, I've decided to stop accepting trackbacks. The reason is simple: spam trackbacks have far outnumbered genuine trackbacks. But comments will remain open, and my comment settings allow HTML. So if you link to Minor Wisdom, feel free to leave a link to your linking post here in a comment.