Pondering the weblog format again

After writing this post I circled back and edited it. A very novel action to take.

Some time was spent pondering a new weblog format and design. Generally speaking the weblog formats supported by WordPress are either a static homepage with a dedicated post page or the posts appear on the homepage. I suppose a third option exists where you could do both if you really were excited about making that happen. I’m on a bit of a streak publishing weblog entries. I used to sit down at the end of the day and write missives before going to bed. Now things are completely flipped around and I spend time focusing and writing at the very start of the day. Some of that time was spent today pondering the weblog format yet again. This is one of those things that happens from time to time. I did consider unlocking the backlog from my weblog again, but that did not happen. The last time I messed around with the weblog background I pushed hundreds of Tweets out in a matter of seconds due to an integration.

For the most part the main point of the weblog is to write down my thoughts for my own purposes. These posts are not really written for any wide readership purpose or for a specific audience of any type. The weblog posts are really just written as part of the stream of consciousness exercise that I like to perform each day. Honestly, things begin to come into focus as I wake up and my thoughts move from a more open space to a focused space. The writing process at the start of the day helps make sure that I boot up into a fully focused and directed purpose for taking action during the day. During those first few minutes of waking up in the morning I could take my day and my writing in any direction. Things could literally just end up going anywhere that a stream of consciousness could take them in that moment. I generally just sit down and begin to type and let the prompt be the guide to writing and following that intellectual rabbit down whatever path appears.

I have tried to set a prompt on a specific topic and really work to focus on that at the start of the day. That approach did not really work. It turns out that I need to spend a few minutes focusing my thoughts and working on the writing process before jumping into anything really targeted. Layered thoughts start to bloom after the initial bit of typing. It’s like the world comes into focus and my energy and questions about that can be deployed from that moment forward in a productive way. For example, this post is about 500 words long and at this very moment, I’m now fully focused and ready to do more complex tasking. That is how it goes or more to the point that is how it starts. Now would be a good time to dip over into my Substack posts or an academic article and start to construct a different type of content.

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.

A few Sunday thoughts about websites

Well I have been working to migrate all the websites I host to a new server and hosting plan. That has been a true adventure. Tonight, for the first time my primary website is fully SSL certificate enabled. So that use of technology turned out well enough. On the other hand, my ASUS Chromebook flip is struggling these days to keep up with my development needs. It is missing a few number keys and a few other keys have stopped working. That is a real pain due to the need to keep the virtual keyboard onscreen. About one third of my screen right now is a virtual keyboard and most of my writing effort is still being done with my keyboard. My honest guess here is that this type of failure is related to my efforts last year to write a million words in the same year. That type of workload was a little bit more than this device was ready to handle. This ASUS Chromebook Flip C101P has been a workhorse. The first time I wrote about the C101P was on December 30, 2017. That is a pretty good run for a laptop computer in my care. My usage pattern is a little bit extreme. I’m probably an outlier in terms of overall keyboard usage on any of my portable computers.