Well, it's officially official. The new blog is live and open to the world.
Took a little bit of doing, but I'm happy with the layout I have. At least happy enough that I won't be too embarrassed if someone I know happens by. Going to try to take to heart some advice I heard on Back To Work, and not fiddle too much with the levers and knobs for the moment, and focus instead on making the cursor move. So, until I have 20 posts in, we're stuck with this theme in this arrangement, and we're going to focus on the writing, okay?
That was part of the problem I had with previous attempts at putting my personal writing online. When I was blogging for TechRepublic, I had deadlines and obligations. That certainly helped focus my effort. Also, since I had no control over design and presentation outside of my little content box, I didn't go down a rabbit hole fiddling with my workflow or the content management system. I composed in Word, researched in Safari, and posted on the official Wordpress server.
At that time, I already had a few posts in a Blogger site. There were a few things in there that I was pretty happy with--there still are. Some of those posts contributed to getting me a paying writing gig. (And some of them may reappear here, reformatted in The Morgue. More on that later.) When I decided that I'd rather have my own nest, I contracted some hosting and then got stuck wasting time with the tools. I'm geeky, so I thought it would be fun to customize and run my own CMS install. Drupal was installed, and fiddled with infrequently. Then I heard about Wordpress and the iOS app that would let me post easily from my phone. So Drupal was ripped out and Wordpress went it. Never really liking my site's layout, and finding the maintenance of my install tedious, I never posted anything. I mean, what's the point of writing a new post when I have security updates to download, right?
Well, sick of that.
I'm certainly paying more for this space than the DIY site I had before--hell, that hosting account still has some time on the meter. But I'm looking forward to having someone else worry about the tedious maintenance tasks, and I'll focus on producing the tedious content.
Current Tools
Site Infrastructure
- Hosting and CMS by Squarespace
- Domain registration by Hover
- Domain integrated mail service by Google Apps
I'm sure more tools will come, and I'll keep a current colophon on this site's about page, but I wanted to note what I'm relying on during this critical honeymoon period. The time when I'm not supposed to be getting distracted by tools.
What's the Morgue? That's what I plan on calling the section of this site that might reprint some of my favorite posts I've made on other sites. Much as I love Squarespace and their tools so far, the blog import tool that I aimed at my Blogger site left much to be desired. Formatting and assets were all kerfuffled--perhaps because of the hacked together HTML I used to get Blogger to display text the way I wanted. I take that as a sign, and I've decided to be selective and reprint only the things worth doing so, rather than bringing over all that old content and installing it at the same level as current work.
The original version of the photo accompanying this post was made by Flickr user JJLosier.
