It’s a Blog!!
I hadn’t planned on writing much here until mid-November, but since the blog is 80% done and my friend Graham told me “the site would look a lot better if you wrote something” I decided to take his good advice.
A little background for those of you who don’t know me: I started out as the Managing Editor of China Expat in February and overhauled their website, redesigned the magazine, and had a lot of fun there. Sadly I will move on to my next challenge in a couple of weeks, but wanted to continue writing my blog, which is currently Daily Tea Leaves, and lives on over at the old site. Since I’m incredibly unoriginal, and for some reason wanted to stick with the ‘tea’ theme, I went for Cup of Cha, with ‘cha’ (茶）meaning ‘tea.’
This blog title was roundly criticized by virtually everyone I know. People liked ‘Cup of Chai’ better, even though that would be Thai. They thought ‘Cup of Tea’ would be better, but that URL was taken, and it didn’t seem very Chinese. Dan Harris over at China Law Blog told me I was doomed to failure since I didn’t have ‘China’ in the blog title (actually he was much nicer and more supportive than that sounds). However, he told me that after I bought this domain, and since this is not going to be a profitable site, and I’m not a hotshot lawyer like he is, I decided to stick with ‘Cup of Cha’. The last suggestion, which I actually liked a lot, was “Cup of Noodle,” from Sam of pink bicycle fame. As you might imagine, that name was taken a while ago.
So here I am, a man with a blog and opinion, but not much to say (or possible too much).
Cup of Cha will mostly be in the same style as the old site, with a few differences. One, this is my blog, entirely owned by me. It will be mostly about China, but since I have other interests (the 2008 election for example), I will voice an opinion. Even though I’m normally terribly shy. You have no say in this, although I’ll be sad if you stop reading.
The second thing, is that there will be regular videos here. Not that kind of video. A friend of mine who has worked for a number of news organizations is currently putting together a documentary. Editing leaves you inside the studio a lot, and she wants to get out and do what she really loves, namely shooting video. She is hoping to go out around Beijing every week or so and put together an interesting segment about what’s going on. We’ll see how it goes, but it’s something to keep your eye out for.
So that’s it for now. These are the things to look out for. If something doesn’t work on the site please tell me, as I’m still doing some house keeping and sorting out the details. Feel free to read and promote me!
If you want to get in contact, you can reach me at: Josh ( at ) cupofcha (dot) com
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chriswaugh_bj responds:
Posted: October 27th, 2007 at 9:44 am →
Actually, I like the name. It’s cool, and a nice follow on from the Daily Tea Leaves. I also think you have the best comment policy I’ve ever seen- nice and clear, yet subtle and laid back. Nice design, too.
The Humanaught responds:
Posted: November 3rd, 2007 at 9:37 am →
I can’t tell you how happy I am that I’ll now be able to read you on a WordPress format - namely, so I don’t have to login to comment.
I agree with Chris that the comment policy is cool, though a bit unneeded. In all my time running blogs, I have yet to have a commenter post a spammy link (Ok, Rebecca Yu and Shopgirl are two annoying exceptions). The spam almost exclusively comes from robots (who are known to ignore comment policies).
Just arm yourself with Akismet (now that you’re on WP, that’s easy!) and take away as many barriers as you can in the commenting process - as it’s a pain to punish the 95% out of fear of the 5%.
One other suggestion (as I’m picky about such things haha), throw the allowable HTML below the comment box. Or just make that big chunk of text between my name and the comment box a whole lot smaller. Again, just personal preference as I’m not very clever and it took me an added second to realize I needed to scroll down further to find the comment box - something that’s going to be annoying after I’ve read the policy 20 times.
Leslie responds:
Posted: November 6th, 2007 at 3:32 pm →
When I saw your new title, I thought, “Since when does Josh speak Portuguese?” “Cha” is tea in Portuguese as well, so soon you might have to include, say, an Angolan perspective here.