…to connect this website to the web. Up until now, I’ve been adding pages and posts to get into the swing of things, but without creating a single inward link from anywhere else. Now I’ve changed all that. This means that search engine web crawlers can at last begin to creep their way in and index what I’ve written. Which in turn means that – before long – somebody’s going to end up reading this stuff. It also means that spambots will start trying to post links to dating sites and other online garbage, but I haven’t made it particularly easy to leave comments yet, so that’s less of an issue now than it might have been.
Whichever way one looks at it, the stakes are raised, so I’m glad to have figured a few things out while pottering around in an essentially private space – for example, that I’ll need to be posting with a time delay to give myself a chance to proof-read, tinker, and adjust what I write before any particular bit of it goes public. The glacial slowness of academic publication has its own problems, but the multiple opportunities for revision it affords are gladly exploited by this particular scholar. (Yes, one can – technically – keep on making amendments after a post has gone live, but that is frowned on within the blogosphere, and with good reason: if some public-spirited individual feels called upon to inform the world that Allington is a fool for writing X, then, certainly, he or she should be able to do so in the confidence that Allington will not have subtly revised X by the time everybody turns up to laugh at it.)
So let’s get on with things. If you found your way here via Google, or Bing, or one of the others – I bid you welcome.
As a student embarking on U214 later this year (and hoping to study linguistics in some shape or form beyond my eventual degree), I’m delighted to have found your website. A wealth of interesting content, no doubt relevant to my current and future studies with the OU.
So glad you found my website – it’s very nice to hear from someone who’ll be studying U214 in a few months! Come this autumn, I’ll have been working on that module for five years, though it’s only been available since February 2012. Very best of luck with your studies – as an undergraduate and beyond.