The Death of the Blog: Back to the Old Ways
Originally posted on July 5th, 2008
I should start out, I suppose, by stating that this is not any sort of screed or rant about the impending death of the "blogosphere" (I really hate that word), or blogging in general. If that's what you were looking for, you might want to stop reading now.
In the Summer of 2006, I converted this website over to a blog format. It was an appealing idea at the time - my friend Drew from MOHDI promised me that it was easy to update, simple to archive and organize, and that I would get a ton more hits. All of that was true, and they were great positives. I went with the format for a satisfactory two years, and then last month I broke it.
I didn't mean to break the damned thing, it just happened. Some of my formatting had somehow got off, and the page alignment was all out of wack. For at least a year I did nothing about it, knowing that it had to have been caused by one of the many PHP pages holding the structure together. I promised myself that I would someday learn SQL and PHP well enough to know what the hell I was doing with it. I never did. One night, I finally resolved to fix the formatting problem, and decided that the best way to learn how to do something was to just dive in and figure it out while I was in the middle of it. I spent ten minutes messing with the portions of the code that I figured were safest, saved it all (not bothering to save back-ups of course), and then refreshed my main page to view the fruits of my rather half-assed labor. I can't say I was wholly surprised when the result of my meddling was a white screen with a PHP error code, but I wasn't especially happy about it either. There was a lot of swearing, some more tinkering (really, destroying) and then in the end, a pathetic "excuse our dust" sort of apology page.
And all of this was the down-side of operating a blog out of a box: I didn't bother to learn the technology before I started using it. Admittedly, I do this sort of thing a lot: I learn the most basic functions of a system before I start using it, promising myself that I will someday become fully-versed in it, and in the end I never really get past the intermediate stage of use. Perhaps the lesson I should take out of all of this is that I should dedicate myself to becoming an expert in the things I use; to know how all of the components of something work before I attempt to employ the whole; or that I shouldn't mess with things I don't know about. In the end, the lesson I chose to learn was: stick to what you know.
I know a lot about the history of Portland. I know a fair amount behind the theory of comics, and how to put a page together. On the past century of art, I know enough to fake it, and have a reasonably successful chance of putting ideas into interesting formats. But when it comes to understanding code, I've never even got to a point where I understand how object-oriented languages work; it's beyond the grasp of my caveman brain that was raised on BASIC and PASCAL.
I dream of building my own databases from scratch, or at the very least, being able to grasp the construction of pre-existing ones, but for the time being I'll settle for what I know how to do already. That means that this site has, for the forseeable future, gone back to the old days of hand-coded html and style sheets. Perhaps some people will find a retro-charm in my late 1990s design skills; at the very least, it will allow me to focus solely on the content of this site.
Maybe I'll take some database classes when I retire...