On Hiatuses and New Beginnings
So, according to the timestamp on my previous post, it’s been 165 days since I last updated this site.
It hasn’t been that I had nothing to say; I’ve always got something to say. I could make an excuse about my wedding and honeymoon taking up time, and then the holidays doing likewise, but it would be just that—an excuse.
I was reading Ray vanderWoning today, and I came to a realization. I used to do a lot of web publishing activities: a personal site, class projects, freelance work, assorted other sites of interest to audiences of varying sizes. Back then, I was doing all hand-coding. I was, on some level, blogging before there was such a thing.
I’m going to pause here to quote Ray at length (in large part because you probably won’t be able to read it, say, next week, if I don’t):
Perhaps we ought to ask ourselves some fundamental questions about why we’re on the Web. What did we hope to accomplish? Who will read our sites? Do we, in fact, need to index, list, quantify, qualify, categorize, sort, arrange, dressup, and multiply our content. Does it need to be syndicated?
Should our links last forever. Do they need to be cruft free? Do they need to be future proof? Does our stuff need to be in a database? Do we really need to wear those goat-leggings and should we really be worshipping Google?
Do we need a better mouse trap?
Perhaps hand-coding really is a better way to publish on the Web.
It was reading this that something dawned on me—I now spend much of the time I’d have previously spent publishing on the web doing other things. I spend it considering the qualities of Wordpress vs. Textpattern. I spend it considering the advantages and drawbacks of Textile and Markdown. I spend it trying to figure out what I need to do to “finish” my weblog template instead of actually creating and publishing things.
And I thought about this for a bit, and realized that, in the last five months or so, the only personal website I’ve updated is the one I do by hand.
So, where do we go from here? In the near term, I’m probably going to keep using Textpattern and this current iteration of the site—unfinished—because on some theoretical level it can make publishing faster. I’m going to stop worrying about whether or not I’ve got the best system. I’m going to stop worrying about what else I “have” to “finish” on a personal website. And, eventually, Textpattern is probably going to go away.
Ultimately, this is going to wind up being a website for me. It might be something like a personal journal. It might not. Things will appear on it because they’re useful to me (like the list of movies I’ve taped off Turner Classic Movies. When they stop being useful to me, they’ll either go un-updated, or, more likely, be deleted. If you find this interesting, swell. If you don’t, then nobody’s forcing you to read it.
I like RSS feeds—they let me know when a site’s been updated. I haven’t yet decided if mine’s going to continue offering one.
I like comments—on some level they seriously lower the bar for giving feedback to the author of a site. But problems with comment spam lead me to believe they’re more trouble than they’re worth. They’re on for now, but in the future they may well disappear.
I don’t particularly need a web text generator like Textile or Markdown. I know HTML. I’m less likely to screw up and do something I don’t want than an automated script is. So I’ll probably stop using those.
Thanks for the kick in the ass, Ray. You might not have realized it, but it was just what I needed.