March 20th, 2003

OK, bit by bit, the new blog is coming together. Comments are enabled and working, and most of the links on the left should work too. There’s still some gropen things and feel free to leave me a comment about anything abnormal you find, just in case it’s something not already on my “to fix” list. Otherwise, I’m taking a break from fiddling with the site to load old diary entries. You know what’s strange? taking text files named totally random things like tattomania.txt or 030303.txt and trying to find meaningful “titles” for them as blog entries. Maybe I should get rid of the title altogether. After all, I might not be able to come up with scintillating enough titles and feel all this pressure to be cool like all the other bloggers and fail miserably and get writer’s block.

Or something.

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So I finally took the plunge and switched to actual blogging software. Everything is in disarray and things only half work and I have dueling cascading style sheets at the moment, but I’m really excited about the new blog software, Nucleus. It provides categories, the entries are stored in a db, the entries are searchable, and it looks highly customizable. Thanks go to Kurt who is always looking out for me and found this recommended by a highly reliable source: Atlee. The current dilemma is whether to allow logins or not. On the one hand, if people made logins, they could filter the blog to show only entries they are interested in. On the other hand, who wants to log in to YET another thing while they’re surfing? Not only that, I can’t seem to categorize entries into more than one category, and longtime readers will know that the way my mind meanders, a single category cannot ever fully encompass a single entry. On the other other hand, with entries being so quick and easy, maybe I’ll just jot little notes here and there and entries will be more focused on one topic. Who knows?

You may see an increase in typos too, as I’m more likely to commit things without a second reading and I have no idea how to run aspell in my browser, or even if such a thing might be possible.

You will also likely experience some deja vu as I spend the next week or so posting in the past to incorporate all the entries from my old diary, but after that, I will turn posting to the past off and everything will be up to the minute, raw, and real. Hurray new blog software. I’ve wanted to have more immediacy to my postings for some time now.

Another bonus to the new software is that readers can now leave comments. Again, this has two sides. On the one hand I could allow only registered users to comment and I would know who was saying what. That seems lame, though, so unless the blog is barraged by bored 12 year olds making fart jokes, I expect to leave things as they now are, so that anyone can make comments.

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