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Tue, 08 Feb 2011
Don't Know About the Future. That's Anybody's Guess. There's something incredibly awesome about sitting in a darkened basement, drinking enengy drinks, and doing maintenance on a website. Headphones blasting a punk rock/hip-hop playlist. Washing machine and dryer quietly grinding away behind you. That's the state I'm in as I write this. Moments, literal moments after I finished writing the previous entry, I took to the internet to find the answer to all my technical difficulties. I found them immediately in the form of a turn-of-the-millenium blogging platform called Blosxom. It's hard to talk about why Blosxom is so great without coming across as if I've suddenly turned autistic. Most people would consider it woefully outdated. It certainly isn't easy to work with, but it accomplishes exactly what I want it to accomplish. The gist is this: You write all your posts as plain text files, using whatever text editor you want: OpenOffice, Windows Notepad, Microsoft Word, TextEdit, Emacs, etc. I'm using JDarkRoom, which quintuples the fun. You then upload the text file to your server. Bloxsom then displays the text in familiar blog form. You can of course use CSS and HTML to format the blog any way you want. I'm sticking with gently formatted user defaults to keep with my original ideas about readability. There is an RSS feed now, which I originally didn't want. What the heck. If I'm all about readability, people should be able to read the blog in an RSS reader if that's what they want to do. There will never be comments. There are categories, for which Blosxom's method is both archaic and hilarious. You simply create a different directory on the server for each of the categories. Blosxom then displays which directory the text file is in at the bottom of each blog post. I have this strange appreciation for antiquated technology. It's a bit of a paradox, because I really love brand-new technology. What it is, I think, is I just hate throwing something away when it's still perfectly good. Maybe I'll write about that next time. It's too much to go into here.
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Eating My Words I apologize for the post I'm about to write here. It's going to be very boring, but it's what's on my mind, so so be it. It's my blog and I go meta if I want to. In the first post I wrote on this blog, I made a big deal about how it's all hand-coded in HTML, and it's all on one page, and "the plan is for it to stay that way." As I'm writing this, I'm not quite sure that's the best plan for the site. (Duh.) I did a lot of research while I was going back and forth about whether I wanted to start blogging again. Most of the OG bloggers I started reading back in the day have moved on to other projects. The ones who still blog either do so very infrequently, or have found some monetary success and now commandeer something more along the lines of a advertising/marketing firm than a personal blog. What I wanted to find out was why (hell, IF) anyone has a personal blog anymore. I also wanted to find some great personal blogs that were still going strong, because at this point, I only know about a few of them. So I took to the Googles, and what I found wasn't pretty. Basically, it all looked like this: "BLOG BLOG MAKE MONEY FROM YOUR HOME SEO MONETIZE SOCIAL NETWORKING FACEBOOK TWITTER!!!!!!!" Disgusting. I also found a lot of advice about what I should do if I have a business and I want to jump on this whole Web 2.0 bandwagon. It pretty much looked like a team of marketing jackholes barfed up a gutful of buzzwords onto their keyboards, then hit "send" before all heading to Applebee's for happy hour. In other words, helpful to no one. So I never found what I was looking for. The only thing I found that was written in decent English all had to do with how your blog should look. I've been blogging for the better part of a decade. I'm also part owner of a somewhat successful blog that actually makes money. I feel comfortable saying that everything I read was a steaming wad of bullshit fired out of a high-powered douche-cannon. The whole thing made me kind of sad, like visiting your favorite playground from your childhood and discovering that it was razed to make way for a tourist bar that constantly pumps "Margaritaville" onto the sidewalk. My response was that I devised a plan. I owned up to the fact that I don't want anything to do with blogging in its current formation. I don't care about the quantity of my visitors, only the quality. I wanted to make it a little bit difficult for people to read my blog. Not too difficult, but I didn't want anyone to read it because they felt obligated because they know me or because they live in my town. That means I didn't want an RSS feed. I've never liked comments, so I wasn't going to include those either. After thinking about it, I didn't want any interactivity of any kind. What I wanted was a static website that I could update frequently. I wanted to write, and to post, and to get my hands as dirty as possible while I was doing it. This is why I decided to hand-code the site, and also to use as little web design as possible. The thing is, I don't know how much longer I can keep up this one-page nonsense. I didn't really think it through. My reasoning was that back in the 90s, people threw default, text-heavy, Times New Roman pages onto the internet all the time, and other people opened and read them fairly easily on a dial-up connection. But what I didn't think about was how people didn't actually write much on the internet back then. They might post a few things, then leave them sitting there for years, as opposed to now when if you want to blog and do it right, you have to post every day. At least. What I'm getting at is that the page is already becoming a bit heavy. Before I wrote this post, it was already 20K, which doesn't sound like much because it isn't. But multiply that times six months, and you're staring to get something. Multiply it by four years, and suddenly that simple textual web page is taking forever to load even on a very fast connection. Since I don't want to have to copy and paste hundreds of posts somewhere down the line, I have to decide fairly quickly here what I want to do with this blog. I'm considering a few options: This is what's occupying most of my head-space right now.
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Back to Basics So after a hiatus, I've returned to the internet in the form of this weird thing. Welcome. Let me show you around the place. As you can see, it's very plain. This is on purpose. I'm not using any blogging software or content-management system whatsoever. Everything is hand-coded using a simple text editor (either TextEdit or Gedit, depeding on whether I'm on MacOS or Ubuntu -- for you Windows users, think Notepad). The "design" if you can even call it that is an extremely gentle tweak of your browser default settings. Everything is on one page, and the plan is for it to stay that way. When I write a new post, I'll just tack it on at the top of the .txt file I keep on my desktop, and upload it. This is all very Web 1.0. Hell, this is Web 0.9. A great metaphor for what I'm doing here is the idea of getting rid of your car (or at least leaving it in the garage) and riding your bike to work instead. Sure, it sounds like a pain in the ass. But if your commute is short and relatively safe, and if the climate you live in is comfortable enough for your tastes, it definitely becomes an option. You don't really need all the luxuries that a car provides -- cruise control, sound system, air conditioning -- if you're only driving for five minutes a day anyway. All you need is to get from one place to the other. The bike is a cheap, healthy option that is quicker than walking and much cheaper and cleaner than driving. Also, biking keeps you in shape. That's my favorite part of the metaphor, because it's a big part of why I'm returning to writing on the internet. I'm in horrible writing condition. I need to start seeing life in terms of the written word again, to slow down and see artistic potential in physical things. You probably rolled your eyes at that last sentence and I don't blame you. Like I said, horrible writing condition. So much of blogging is about things other than writing. It's about social interaction. It's about how many comments you can get. It's about commenting on other people's sites so that they come back and comment on yours. It's about how many hits you get. It's about how many subscribers you get. It's about getting reblogged. It's about getting likes on Tumblr and Facebook. It's about reblogging and liking, trying to build an audience of fellow rebloggers and likers, who reblog and like you in return. It's exhausting. And kind of disgusting. I don't need any of that, and to keep myself on the right path, I've rendered it all impossible. There is no commenting system. Hell, there isn't even an RSS feed. If anyone is going to read this journal, they're going to have to bookmark it and keep coming back. I know. I know. No one is going to read this journal. Not under these circumstances. I'm okay with that. Before I started this, I tried a few other things. I had a secret blog for awhile. I got so bored with it that I actually forgot where it was, and had to search through my browser history to find it so I could delete it. I tried writing in a file on my desktop and keeping it there, but there was no accountability. I could write any kind of crap and it wouldn't matter. Those cheesy writing books always say that is a good thing, but it really isn't. Writing crap isn't fun. With this, I'll be publishing stuff on a URL with my actual name on it. I did this for seven years, and it was almost always enjoyable. Except when it got unenjoyable and I quit. But I think all I needed was to wipe the board clean and start afresh. Ugh. Like I said. Horrible writing condition.
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