About this site
This site is a personal online journal with no agenda other than to provide an easy way to continue writing and sharing ideas with friends. I’ve been writing a journal in some form or other since 1980, originally in one of those black and white composition notebooks, which grew to several of them, then taped together, then carried about in a box… For many years I didn’t use a computer to write even though I have always had computers in the house since my first Timex Sinclair, preferring the more tactile scribbling to typing. That is, until the advent of the internet where it became clear that I could begin to write things other people might actually *read*. Changing *how* I was writing necessitated a change in *what* I was writing, or at least it brought about a greater cautiousness in topic selection. Writing about your employer, or your personal family life is probably not a very good idea when you don’t know who might be reading what you write. This means that a lot of what I write is no longer a ‘journal’ in it’s original sense (to me). I now write about things I am interested in at the time, things I’ve found on the internet, events, etc. and I have a sort of unwritten rule to to try to keep in mind that I am publishing to the whole world, which certainly includes employers and family members.
Things I’m interested in are listed in the Categories section at right. Clicking on one will list stories I have posted from only the selected category.
For a time after starting to put stuff online, I actually did start keeping a digital version of a real journal in the computer but because I have a tendency to change operating systems quite frequently, I chose to keep this in a simple text file which eventually grew huge and unwieldy. My first online journal entries were basically just selections of this text formatted with HTML (by hand in a text editor).
This became tiresome, and I stopped publishing online for a while. For several years I kept the journal up on my m500 palm pilot (using Wordsmith), but when that died expectantly (do they ever die expectantly?), I realized I was lucky to have kept good backups of it and wouldn’t trust a palm pilot again for my personal journal.
My first attempts at a more automated system to maintain my huge number of text file entries were very frustrating. I didn’t really have a strong enough background in any scripting language to do anything useful on my own, so I started looking around for something already written that I could use to publish online. At the time, web forums were getting very popular so I decided to try using Yabb (Yet another bulletin board). It was fairly easy to set up, and I learned a lot about scripting getting it running. It was written in Perl though which, even after several years of mucking around trying to learn it, I still find incredibly obtuse. I started looking for something that would allow me to bust out of the forum model when I realized that there really wasn’t going to be much use for one anyway – I was writing things and my friends, though they might be reading them, didn’t find it necessary to post responses and well, that’s the point of a bulletin board: conversations. I wanted something that I could use to post text, and that would stand on it’s own without *needing* to have responses tacked on to the posts to seem relevant.
Blosxsom seemed like it might be perfect, but it was also written in perl (though there is a python version I have running at home), and I was able to just drop in all my text files into a hierarchical directory structure and the script just *built* a website out of it! This seemed like the perfect solution, but there were a lot of limitations, including a limited number of ‘plugins’ and the fact I couldn’t easily maintain the site (due to my own ineptitude with perl). I still use blosxom to arrange a lot of detritus on my hard drive which I would probably never even look at again otherwise. It’s also rsynced to the web for easy reference.
Geeklog looked really cool, but I was intimidated by PHP which was *another* language I didn’t know, but I slowly cam up to speed enough to get it running. I eventually used Geeklog for many years, and still use it for other sites I run, but maintaining this huge (though powerful) CMS system for a simple blog turned out, for me, to be a bit of overkill.
This site is currently powered by Wordpress. Luckily I found a really helpful geeklog importer script which managed to bring in the entire site without much of a hitch. I did have to restore a copy of the GL database into the Wordpress database first since I couldn’t get it to import from a separate database (I’m sure someone smart could figure it out). I was able to easily find many different Wordpress plugins that provide nifty functionality for this site (I’ll eventually list all of these here) which I either had already implemented in Geeklog, or wished I could.
You can sign up on the site if you anticipate being a regular user, so when you arrive you can quickly comment without having to type in a name, email, and answer the challenge question every time. Registered users also have the sole use of their Nickname, so you can be sure no one else can post here and try to make it *look* like you! Registering is no longer required to comment here – I’ve only recently re-enabled this – but you *do* have to type in some data and prove you’re a human and not a spam ‘bot.
Nov 15, 2009: enabled Super-Cache for non-logged in folks. This should significantly improve performance which has been *really* sluggish due to Dreamhost’s mysql setup.
