Category: pushing the sky

So my site was offline with a bad plugin for just over 2 weeks, and I had no idea.

I used to check this shit daily.

Goddamn WordPress plugins are so. fucking. frustrating. Fantastic in theory, easy bit of functionality to extend the system, but the biggest source of vulnerabilities in the software, so you feel like you have to turn on automatic updates. Except now, turns out, I’m vulnerable to a plugin updating that goes bad, and fucks up the whole fucking site. Like, what kind of fucking design is that? Oh right, PHP, where the browser is the error console. GAH.

I really need to sort out where I’m at with this place, and what I’m doing with it

Bit of administrivia – I’ve installed the WPtouch plugin here, which ensures the site looks fancy and iPhone-app like on your “iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Opera Mini mobile, Palm Pre [or] BlackBerry Storm” device – now while I suspect it’ll be a while before I have any significant audience on that, it certainly does tidy up nicely, and if you’ve got one of the aforementioned devices, it’s worth checking out & probably installing on your site.

In some respects this now makes the site look much like any WordPress site on the iPhone, especially since WordPress.com has this plugin installed & enabled by default, but the benefit of the design and additional functionality is well worth the trade-off of appearance.

I remember once upon a time I’d discover a new blog and spend hours going backwards through time to try to reach the first post. It felt practically necessary – the only way context could be sufficiently established, that you could follow along with new developments. In the days before RSS – that is, only 5 years ago – you’d click through your list of links daily, just to discover if they’d posted something new.

It was all the better for the site to be one of the hand-crafted ones, where you knew that someone had to spend time creating the latest “entry” page by hand, updating the archives page. Those based on a dynamic updating platform had a curiously flat appearance to them, all “posts” the same in some respect or another… and yet there was an undeniable appeal, the simplicity of not having to upload, the ease of automatic archiving – and the brilliance of RSS, all for (practically) free.

All you had to do was learn the template.

And then people (ok, at least I) got lazy. There were better designers out there, and they were giving away templates as they played with new layouts – CSS had arrived, and there was experimentation to be had. And then it got accessible – anyone could do it, technical skills or no.

For a time, it was good. People were experimenting, the format was evolving, and there was a whole net out there to be explored.

After that time, it got staid. Everyone had a blog, a flickr account, a myspace page, and a facebook profile. And along came tumblr, tempting with its short-form updates. Youtube provided a diversion into video blogging, and the multifarious podcasting tools for those who preferred audio. And then came the prodigal son, twitter, life in bite-size chunks of 140 characters.

Now, they’re all hungry, as the newly social internet runs on the back of that ubiquitous term, user-generated content. They ask you to Add a New Post, or What Are You Doing? or the latest prompt, What is On Your Mind?, as though the answers were being sought for anything other than page-views and the corresponding ad dollars.

Whatever happened to us?

Continue reading “Add New Post”

On break, this week is all kinda nuts at work; next week probably will be too.

In the mean time… keep a watch on del.icio.us, maybe.

When did this place become a ‘blog’ instead of a ‘homepage’?

Or was it ever a ‘homepage’?

I remember back in the day (10 whole years ago!), people didn’t have ‘blogs’, they had ‘home pages’. It was different for one reason: a blog you’re expected to update, and is supposed to be for people to look in. A home page, on the other hand, didn’t need to update for months on end (but that didn’t stop you from checking back every day if it was a really good home page).

But then… but then, the online diary, the web log came along, and the mishmash ended, and everyone transitioned to the blog. The extra bits of the home page – the carefully crafted, hand built HTML of pages past all gone, replaced by the march of time-stamps and updates to show you were still alive.

The borg of blogs hastened assimilation with the combined might of the blogging software and RSS essentially redefining and replacing the need for refreshing a home page, the need to revisit sites to see if something’s changed – you don’t go to the content, the content comes to you.

Let’s be honest – any blog might be a place to visit, but it’s by no means a ‘home’ you can wander in whenever you wish. ‘House page’ also doesn’t have the same ring to it. So somewhere along the way, I think we lost the homepage, the collection of random that constituted the online existence. I lost my list of links for a blogroll, and I’ve even lost that since in an effort at simplification.

It’s something I’m working to restore. I’m going to go back to the home page, the home over the blog alone. This will necessitate moving away from having WordPress do everything for me – for me to actually crank out an angle bracket or two again. It’ll probably break the ‘permalinks’ too, but it’s got to be done. It’s no longer a home, and I didn’t set out to do that.

Pushing the sky has had its stay of execution, and for now lives on for at least another year.

Now, for me to actually go do something with it.

What say you to the prospect of a forum again? (Yes yes, I know, but I’m partial to forums okay?)