My usual method for participating in online forums is copy-and-paste;
pasting pre-written text into text boxes in forms; the usual space
provided for interactive websites. I read and write between library visits.
The visits themselves are rare opportunities requiring efficient use of time;
if you were to observe me in action, my activities would be seen as a rehearsed,
and in real-time mindless, frenzy
mostly of uploading, saving-to-file, zipping directories, copying and pasting to posting
forms, and clicking links in my to-do lists.

Most places (as here at tribe.net) I post plain-text.
I use inline HTML tags in forums I know to interpret these tags in a consistent and predictable way,
which is not very many places in today's typically value-subtracted online world.
In wikispace, I use the local wiki-markup dialect, to the extent that I understand the local dialect.
This sometimes results in embarrassment, as markup-language-learning by trial-and-error
requires the learner to use the wiki or other engine interactively.
My own modality of vagrant netizenship requires a reversion to some of the
methods of batch processing. I would like to think this has led to marked improvement
in the quality of writing I have posted online, but it has definitely impaired
my ability to learn new markup languages and dialects.
Nowhere in my growing webliography has this been more apparent than at blogger.com,
where I post entries to my blog, which can be seen at n8chz.blogspot.com.
While I take some pride in some of the writing I have posted there,
I am very embarrassed about the sloppy formatting.
The problem, it seems, rests in what blogger.com calls 'templates.'
As is to be expected, there is a language for making templates.
I have yet to learn this language. For me, language learning is
always a trial-and-error process. One thing which can definitely
hasten this process for me is a non-interactive tutorial, which is to
say a textbook, or better yet a synopsis or reference card that furnishes examples.
The difficulty I have had so far in obtaining such tutorial resources using
search engines is troubling. It leads me to wonder whether the template language
I seek to learn is itself proprietary. Such a discovery would dampen my hopes for the blogosphere
as an at least partial revival of the communicational democracy of Internet Classic, which is to say the Internet's age
of innocence prior to the Clinton-Gore-era commercialization.

Another problem I have had with the blogger.com interface (both plaintext and their brand of pseudo-HTML)
is their handling of line breaks. I hope to find a more batch-friendly way to interface with blogger.com.

My hope for the coming year...that by the end of 2007 the present (Vagrant Netizen) tribe
will have a membership roster! I can't be the only one...