A Brief Note of Explanation, Kinda

I guess I should offer some explanation about why the blog has been dormant for so long. Frankly, I can only speak for myself and you can put it down to exhaustion and lack of motivation as far as I am concerned (the rest of the contributors can speak for themselves). Even though I returned from vacation a while ago, and there have been a number of topics I have thought of blogging about (Lord knows, there always are in Pakistan), the two main reasons for the absence are the power woes that KESC's dastardly staff has put all of Karachi through - and which have sapped my energy in more ways than one - and the feeling of futility that engulfs all of us living in Pakistan at some point or the other, which has been particularly marked over the last few months. After a while, unending tales of incompetence, brutality, corruption, dishonesty and cynical manipulation do tend to numb you. I am not at all implying that this is in any way only specific to Pakistan. But since I live here, I can only speak for life in this place. The tendency often is to try and find solace in other, lighter things.

At another level (and somewhat contradictory to the sense of futility), there is also a feeling that there is little point in spending hours constructing posts on matters that others have already addressed or are already addressing. When we began the blog, very, very few people were taking on the media as a subject. Thankfully, a lot more debate now occurs on the subject both online and in the print and electronic media and that is a good thing. A lot more people are also willing and vigilant enough to call out inconsistencies and issues in the media. One hopes we have played a small part in making that possible but, yes, it can lead to complacency.

I know these may be seen as just excuses for laziness and I am willing to concede that. But I thought I owed it to our readers to at least provide some explanations, even if they are mere excuses. Hopefully, we'll get over our blue funk and soon get our mojo back.

Facebook Administrative Issues

This is just a short post about administrative matters.

Apologies to all those complaining about our Facebook page not being updated regularly. We had put the Facebook page up to automatically aggregate our posts and twitter feeds and had hoped we wouldn't need to do more on a regular basis.

The newer, hopefully better, Cafe Pyala Facebook page

It turns out that the issue was with Facebook itself and some new required permissions it put in place in November, pending which our blog's RSS feeds stopped being updated under the 'News' tab. We have made some changes to the page so that our blog posts will now arrive directly on the 'Wall.' There is no longer a 'News' tab though Twitter feeds can still be seen under the Twitter tab. Hopefully this should also mean that new posts should also automatically turn up in the 'NewsFeed' of those people who are 'Fans' of the page.

Please do let us know if this is working out all right. You can reply either in the comments under this post or under the Discussion tab on the Facebook page itself.

Convergence

So, this is merely an administrative type post. Trust us.

Thanks to the millions of people... ok, thousands of people... ok, two or three anonymous commenters on the blog who wondered why Cafe Pyala's posts were not shared more widely on Facebook, we've finally created a page for ourselves on that darned social networking site. We don't really think it will make much difference - people share what they share - but at least next time someone asks us that question, we can throw this in their face. (The things we do to go one up on our readers.) Incidentally, not sure if you guys noticed or not but there's been a sharing hotlink to Facebook and a couple of other sites below each post for some time now.

In any case, if you're on Facebook, you can look us up on our Official Facebook Page. We're listed as, believe it or not, Cafe Pyala.

But actually what is kind of exciting about the Facebook page, purely from a tech point of view, is that it aggregates not only our blog posts but also our Twitter feed (@cpyala, yeah, we've kind of got used to that infernal thing too, though if truth be told it makes us waste even more time than we already did). We believe this is known as 'convergence' in techspeak. Not sure if it will make a darned bit of difference to us but it sounds cool.

So, if you're one of those people who find it a gargantuan task to open a new tab/window on your browser and actually mosey over to our blog because you're too busy checking out who's becoming friends with whom in your news feed, we've made things easier for you. You can stalk us equally easily as your crush from school.

So that's it. We're on Twitter and Facebook as well now. Told you this was nothing but administrative crap. You can go back to your bunkers now.