A New Start

For the past few months I’ve been experimenting with various blog options, trying to figure out what I miss from blogging, what I’d like to have back and how best (and where best) to do it. The few previous posts are traces of some of what’s been going on behind the scenes on other domains to mark that work.

Beginnings & Retreat

I began posting to Ordinary Human Language in summer 2011. After an uncertain start, I wrote extensively for five or six years, but then for a variety of reasons, I began to slow down and pull back. In part, I was overwhelmed by technical problems that were more than I could handle with what I knew at the time. I had also slowly become wary of public writing and had begun posting less often, less widely and less honestly. Why this happened is complicated. Then in late 2019 when my site was hacked, I took down my Wordpress installation and replaced it with a much reduced and simplified flat-file site. I updated it sporadically but never found my footing. A year later when the pandemic finally began to weigh me down and online was becoming everything, I stopped posting completely, using blog time to go outside and to walk or bike or run.

Exploring

During that time I was still “blogging” in a sense, only I was doing it privately rather than publicly. I was experimenting, trying to understand why I wrote up my reactions to books and movies and all the rest. I wasn’t sure what they were for and wasn’t sure what made a blog the place I enjoyed keeping them.

Some things were obvious. It mattered that blog posts were discreet entries, and that over time, they hung together and emerged as a bigger whole. It mattered that entries floated away and disappeared as they aged and as my attention shifted, but that they remained present and could jump back into view with only the click of a link. It mattered that the entries had images selected in the moment they were written and that when I saw them years later they’d remind me of the moment (and of me) when I chose them. The best offline equivalent I found for my blog was The Brain, and I blogged daily for myself from 2019 through 2023 in that software.

Ultimately though, I realized that the public aspect of blogging, however difficult I found it, was important to me. It’s such a small thing in principle, given how few people will ever read what I post. Yet, regardless of whether anyone’s reading, I began to realize that turning my voice away from myself and toward the world changes how I write and think. There’s a tension between, on the one hand, a drive to bring a written comment to a finished public form, and on the other, the freedom of speaking into a wide open space where no one is listening (even if I’m haunted by the myth of Melampus and the reeds). That tension confused me in the past, but oddly enough, I think I’ve come to enjoy it.

The New Run

Given how much the act of blogging preoccupied me, I was surprised to find that it has been been the basic technical choices about platform that have given me the most problems as I’ve come back online. WordPress is the obvious easy answer to the question, “How should I blog?,” and over the past weeks, I’ve flopped from using it to not using it to using it to not until I’ve lost count of the loops I’ve made. Two factors ultimately made WordPress nonviable. First, I am bound to WordPress for a different project, and don’t feel like using it twice. Second, I refuse to commit what I write to an online tool I can barely run and can’t fix when (not if) things go wrong. I did that from 2011 to 2020. It went badly.

So if I was going to blog, I decided I needed to find a way to blog through Eastgate’s Tinderbox. Luckily, I wasn’t starting from scratch: I already had my two earlier attempts to work from. The first was my monstrously complex experiment from 2017. In that file, with extensive help from people on the Eastgate forum, I’d done the work of creating a simulacrum of my WordPress site with all the menus, sidebars, categories, tags, etc. It worked, it was marvelous, and a day or two after I posted it, I retreated to WordPress, overwhelmed by the technical load of maintaining it. The second was the exceedingly simple file I’d constructed as an archive for the original site after being hacked. It was a single column, a simple menu for some categories, but it boasted css for both a light and a dark solarized theme.

I wanted to land somewhere between these two extremes. I wanted the images, stable links, and organized page navigation of the first site, but in a package that was, as much as possible, as simple as the archive site I’d built. It’s taken some work, but what you are reading now is the compromise I’ve arrived at for the moment. I’m happy with it, and although some things may change a bit as I test everything out and work through kinks, I hope that I’ve built a base that is stable enough to work with for the foreseeable future. Stay tuned.

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So, a long post, but I thought it was worth marking the new start with a few words of context. Thanks for reading.