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Saturday January 13, 2007

Sick transit, or glory be

It's probably obvious that I've been in a state of increasing dither here for some time, mostly centered around the online journal and the increasing number of problems I've been experiencing with it.

First thing to say is that the online journal will go on as long as I'm able to type, and I can still rattle the keyboard at an impressive rate.

The way in which I keep it is however going to have to change, for several reasons:

• I'm spending longer and longer as the months go by patching and mending the html code, which is now around four years old—an age in Internet terms.
• I am getting slower and slower at the job of maintaining the html files and the site as a whole; it maybe my age or, more likely, that I'm getting bored with carrying the burden.
• I suspect there's a new generation of html/css coming along and I know I'll not want to spend the time learning it.
• The whole thing is taking up far too much of my time each day. I need to get out more, otherwise there'll be nothing to write about.
• Last but not least I want to free up some time so that I can learn video movie making and build a bit of expertise in that field.

Even the term—'online journal'—is a little old-hat now. Like it or not, it's a 'blog', and the act of keeping it is 'blogging'. Neither of them are attractive words but there you go. We live in a changing world.

When you go a'blogging, though, you're freed from all the hassle of html, css, and file maintenance. Once you have the thing set up you simply sit down, type, and click on 'publish' when you're done. I've been envying that simplicity for a long time.

I started out on the blogged path by trying several flavours of blogging software on my own server. Seemed the obvious way. There's a major snag however. To get the stuff loaded, installed and running requires the site owner to learn at least a modicum of unix and php. For an old mainframe programmer like me the ultimate flexibility of these things requires a shift in mindset that's, well, challenging. A few days back, after another failed attempt, I deleted the whole workspace for the umpteenth time, shut the computer down, went out for a little walk.

I really can't be doing with it. It's just too fiddly and my fingers, both physical and mental, are not up to fiddly work anymore.

So, I thought as I battled into the wind, why not leave the whole business to them as enjoys it and use the fruits of their labour, and their expertise? Why not, in other words, switch over to a blogging service?

I've spent the time since looking at a number of blogging services. The one that most suits the way I think, and the way I work, is wordpress.

The bottom line is that I've opened a (free) account and set up a blog, loading all my January entries from here. You can find it here, and I'll repeat the URL in my notifies while I'm running in parallel. I'm still fiddling with it, to make it more closely resemble this incarnation of the journal and, in particular, to improve visual access characteristics.

For a time, then I'll run the two in parallel, with the exact same content, including future videos and photographs. If the blog proves a success, and it's already looking good, I shall switch the oldgreypoet domain to point to it and set back to enjoy the writing once more without the periodic need to switch my attention to the medium rather than the message. It's the message that concerns me, or the writing of it.

I have yet to decide the fate of my archives and photo galleries. On the archives, there seems to be no easy way of converting them to blog format. I have three options open to me: leave 'em alone and just link 'em to the new blog, drop 'em entirely, or drop them but make them available as an on-demand e-book. I'll decide that sometime between now and the end of May, when the hosting service will be due for renewal. On the photographs, I've seen some excellent photo galleries on wordpress and I shall investigate them further. Same applies to future video clips. I shall keep them on YouTube, but I like the idea of a library of stills attached to the blog as a permanent link list. We shall see.

And that's the outcome of the day, really. We shall see. I'm not sick but I am in transit. Glory be.

Readers' note:  The Haloscan comments are still acting up so I've dropped 'em. The comments feature on the mirror blog works fine.