February 16, 2003
Changes afoot...
Someone remarked to me today that this website was pretty introspective (in comparison to others that tend to fuel conversations...but thats another story...). I hadn't realized it, but looking back, I have been doing a fair bit of navel-gazing here lately. I found this rather odd actually, because my preference is to get stuck in my head while I'm stuck in traffic. Taking advantage of the quiet time that occurs in gridlock between Point A and Point B is a lot more productive, in my books, than publicly dropping pixels into the bitstream. I view the bitstream as the perfect place to get really opinionated about things I care about one of my intentions for this website. of course, the best laid plans seldom are... I spent the afternoon organizing my photographs. This means taking the individual negatives that I've accumulated over the years and filing them into dustproof little sleeves. It also means sitting in the same spot for hours wearing white cotton gloves while I remove 2100 little plastic strips from 300 old pages of sleeves and put them into 300 new pages of sleeves that I can store chronologically in binders.Fun.
This let me get stuck in my head (while I was stuck between Point A and Point B) and try to figure out why the tenor has changed so much over here. The only answer that I came up with pointed towards my move to MovableType. The templates that I settled on tend to push me towards actually writing posts that carry complete cogent thoughts instead of dropping sound-bytes into the blogosphere like my old Radio templates did. A one liner would just look goofy sitting on my new mainpage whereas the old one thrived on micro-posts. MT doesn't support post by email - which means little micro-thoughts don't get their own permalink. Instead, they get distilled into larger posts.
Originally I thought that this would be a good direction in which to take things and have the side-effect of forcing me to think throught the important bits a lot more thoroughly and in the context of each other. Now I'm thinking that I need to bring some of that rapid fire, stream of consciousness posting back. I don't want this to mean new templates. Instead, some thinking should allow me to come up with some new primitives that mix the best of both styles into a useable format.