barrettchase.com

barrettchase.com
obey the rules. often enter. organize your material.

Tue, 08 Feb 2011

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:

Keeping things as they are and saying screw it.
Staying with the hand-coding, but coming up with a system for archiving.
Coming up with a system for archiving, and writing my own blog engine that only does the few lightweight tasks I actually need.
Going back to Wordpress or Blogger, and writing my own template that relies heavily on browswer defaults, like the (lack of) design I'm currently using.
Trying out some other content-management system, just for fun.

This is what's occupying most of my head-space right now.

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