Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

A weblog created by Dr. Nels Lindahl featuring writings and thoughts…

Category: Weblog

  • Getting ready for the weekend

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  • Blogging along since 2002

    This blog has existed in a number of formats over the years. Different underlying platforms have supported things. Microsoft Frontpage, Movable Type, and WordPress have all been a part of the technology footprint. According to captures from the Wayback Machine you can see results dating back to 2002. Certainly that type of internet archaeology is interesting, but not entirely informative. It does serve as a reminder of the degree of permanence that exists with online works. I do have a massive word processing document with pretty much every post in order dating back that far, but I have given up a couple of times trying to edit that massive volume of work. Not that long ago I did go out and clean up some manuscripts to make sure they were back in print. Keeping things in print is an important part of them being available. 

    Emotions abound these days. I’m settling into a new situation. Even my daily monitor setup is different. It takes some time to try and figure out exactly what is next. Things unfold along the way. One of the things that I wanted to figure out was how to devote a little bit more time to producing some weblog posts. It’s interesting that WordPress cannot send more than a certain number of links back over to Twitter these days. Everything has gotten so much more political recently. Social media as a landscape is changing a ton right now. The advent of Blue Sky as a prominent player is happening as a scarcity of invites has stirred up a lot of interest. You could easily consider it a cool kids club right now. 

    Being in the camp of people who have published millions of words online I’m certainly no stranger to publishing content. I downloaded my 10,000 tweet archive the other day from Twitter. I actually almost flipped the whole collection to the “protect your tweets” side of things. Taking that course of action was briefly considered, but I figured oh well and left them online. It’s possible some new social media players are going to pop up here this year. We will see what happens in 2024 and beyond with the totality of social media engagement.

  • Marching forward with positive intent

    Yesterday involved channeling a lot of my energy into marching forward with positive intent. Actually doing that is much harder than it always seems to be when things break down. Every day I’m getting up and writing at the start of the day. That is a good way to get back into my routine of consequential prose production. You have to sit down and do the work. To that end a few years back I took the entire backlog of this weblog and put it into a Microsoft Word document. Oddly enough that backup actually has all the right photographs with the posts. I could use that backup to put the photos back with the right posts. I’m not sure if that is really what I should spend my time doing, but it is certainly something that I could do with my time. Really the only proper backup of the media is in those exported Microsoft Word backups from the “Print My Blog” WordPress plugin. The entire backup of my weblog writings would be an approximately 600 page tour of my writing from around 1998/1999 to 2022. 

    That content could be exported and put into a hardback book for posterity. I have resisted doing that without taking the time to edit the entire project a little bit before sending it for publication. That big of an editing commitment is a really hard call to make. On the other side of the argument would be if all those posts are just sitting online why do they need to be edited before showing up in a print version. That is probably a decent question to consider. A little light editing for grammar and spelling would make it a lot more readable, but that is how I view the content with 20 years of writing experience and the power of hindsight. Given that anybody that would pickup that type of weighty tome of weblog nonsense should have the best possible experience sifting through the prose a little editing is probably warranted. Some egregious spelling errors can make things hard to read and are off putting. Oddly enough twenty years ago I would have clearly made the case that the argument itself remains regardless of the words supporting it. Really great truths and arguments do have a habit of standing on their own and being shared in terms of broader public mind and generally in the academy. My current views on it are a little different. I typically try to produce the cleanest prose possible even on the first draft. 

    I’m going to potentially create a version of my weblog in hardcover and just take a look at it to see how it makes me feel to review it in person. That is probably the best way to judge what to do with it next in terms of editing or review. I could take the time to edit it by hand in printed form and that would be an interesting journey. I might do that this weekend or maybe even later tonight just for fun.

  • Moving domains around

    A lot of indexing is going to happen at some point. Earlier today the weblog subdomain prefix of “new” was discharged completely. It required a phone call to support and a ton of restoration work, but the content is for the most part back up and running at my primary domain. A clean install and reload from the manual OneDrive backup that I keep had to be completed. I’m not entirely sure if this time around all the media got dropped. At some point tomorrow I’m going to try to dig into my other backups to figure out if the media exists.