Blogging is an interesting concept. It’s something I’ve toyed with since before the term was coined.

It’s never seemed to be particularly useful to me. Each item is a kind of pointless bit of gossip whose usefulness is at first questionable and which becomes less and less valuable over time.

See also:

• https://www.burtonini.com/blog/2016/08/26/so-long-wordpress/

• 2024-02-06 — BlogText has been officially abandoned, making this blog vulnerable to extinction.
• 2017-11-12 — The experiences of the WP-SpamShield plugin team confirm what I’ve suspected for some time. WordPress is run by a tyrannical dictatorship.
• 2017-11-11 — Some time before this time I had learned that WordPress was infected by the horrible homily types.
• 2015-12-10 — I haven’t used the Compiled Website in a very long time, and have been chipping away at it before I entirely kill that projects. BlogText with WordPress has made that possible.
• 2015-06-21 — I’ve been using BlogText and tags with excellent success. I’ve been happy enough that I’ll be obsoleting the Compiled Website project so I can unlearn programming.

• 2014-08-04 — I did end up implementing the Compiled Website, although I haven’t used it or updated its programming for some time.

A particular post is only appropriate if it’s a snapshot in time. If it’s meant to be something kept up-to-date, then it’s destined for properly-maintained documentation.

A lot of personality bleeds through into a blog post, which is nice. It’s a bit of a vent for me, but I still can’t understand what real value it has. Perhaps when I get comfortable in these shoes, I’ll be making reviews so worthy of attention that what I talk about will actually be considered by whatever team managing whatever I’m reviewing. And yet, aren’t good bug reports and feature requests more appropriate?

So you see, this whole affair seems, well, stupid.

If it wasn’t that, it’s the raw mechanics of what I have to deal with to interact with these words. Actually creating a new post takes so damned much time and effort .. that it’s truly nerve-wracking. When I was first introduced to a real wiki, my productivity was staggering. Reducing the time to create a new post from tens of seconds to load a page to a fraction of a second means so much to me. I’ll have an idea in my head, and the more time I spend gaping at a partially-loaded page is the more time there is for the quality of that thought to fade into oblivion.

Yes I’ve used Google Gears, and I won’t use it again.  I simply do not trust it.  I’m getting sick and tired of online-capable software creeping into the far corners of my computer.  Webmail, customized start pages, search engine memory, search engine wiki, online docs and spreadsheets, tracking of video viewing, blogging.. etc etc.  All this online nonsense is just freaking me out.

The same is true for the actual interaction with the text itself. How fast is it to make a link, to make a list, to do something simple like indenting? Well, with an RTE everything is slow as mud. This is the fundamental reason why beginning a blog post and saving drafts takes so damned long. The HTML view is much better. But. Well, it’s HTML. It just sucks. I’ve still got the skills to throw in all those angled brackets all the time, but I’m so spoiled by MediaWiki that I can’t stand HTML. I also can’t stand any of the other markup languages because they completely fail to create a proper syntax. Heck, I still use <b> and <em> in MediaWiki. I never intended to stay with MediaWiki because of its absolutely insane markup language. Who the hell would think that '''bold''' is intuitive?

These are simple:

*bold*
_underlined_
/italicized/
-struck through-

It’s not hard. It really isn’t. Well, the strikethrough is a bit annoying, but even that’s not so bad.

I’ve been contemplating creating a compiled website – one which is managed offline and which is just automatically synced. I don’t even have to worry about synchronization, I could just wrap the whole affair in an SSH-mounted directory (SSHFS, shfs)  or a mirroring system (LFTP mirrorring?). It’s not hard. I could even have a versioning engine (Git, Subversion) so I can see changes and do rollbacks.

I even have the programming skill to implement the markup language, but I’m still dismayed that nobody else cares enough to create a markup language The Right Way. (see Compiled Website) All other languages have truly insane markup. I can’t imagine a good reason why **this is bold** and __this is italics__, aside from a lazy programmer.

At any rate, I could deal with the inadequacies of blogging itself, but the WordPress engine is just too slow, and the idea of remote-editing is just too lame. For collaboration there is nothing better, but for a single user it’s just dumb to put all that crap in the way. Even if I were to move around to multiple computers, it would be easier for me to have a USB key with some simple tools to just SSH into my machine. Or maybe I could use an online web service to let me SSH in. It’s all doable.

I’d end up migrating all these posts to that new engine. But the thing is that I really like some of the blog ideas, like commenting. But what I’d really want to check out is the micro-mailinglist concept I saw like with Whisper [ 1 ] . I’d also either tie the blog quite directly into MediaWiki or create a separate wiki-style engine. Or maybe it would all be the same kind of thing, and I would find some way to export the MediaWiki pages and import them into my system. But I know that would be next to impossible, because there is no sensible export feature in MediaWiki. Yes, I’ve seen what they have and it’s fucking lame. Maybe I’d make a spider to go through and dump out the raw text for each page. That should be easy enough to do.

Ooh, the spider also has some other applications which I’d like to achieve, like automatic gallery downloading – even when a thumbnail’s destination page is HTML with a larger image embedded.

I know I could do that with Watir. Hmm, but do they work with Firefox yet? FireWatir [ 2 ] was planned to be integrated some time ago.

• 2014-08-04 – Yes, I do believe they work with Firefox, and have for some time now.

Ok, I’m sidetracked enough. I’ll do some playing and report back later.

• 2014-08-04 — I did end up implementing the Compiled Website, although I haven’t used it or updated its programming for some time.

• 2011-08-19 — The Compiled Website blog page was created

Footnotes

1. Whisper, and all of the author’s stuff was abandoned. [ ↩ ]
2. was http://code.google.com/p/firewatir/ but became part of the Watir project. [ ↩ ]