I've been feeling the urge to explain these pages for a while. I suppose it's also a random excuse to generate content, but now that I've raised the question...
One big part of it, at Mark's urging, but I agree with him, is to get writing practice. At work, and at other contexts, my written communication skills aren't what they could be. They're probably acceptable once I produce something, but actually getting me to do the writing is difficult. I will use any excuse to put it off, and if I've gotten past that (which is rare) I often spend a fair amount of time staring at an empty buffer if I don't have a good idea of what I'm going to say before hand. Of course, if I do have something to say and I can get myself to do it, I can often blather incessantly. It's not like I'm a slow typist.
Another thing, which hadn't occurred to me at the time I started, is keeping people I don't talk to as much as I should reassured that I still exist. My mother (Hi, Mom!) will be happy to see this entry, for instance.
This also serves as a place to note facts and links to things with more context than a bookmark file somewhere where I won't lose it. [Paper] notebooks? They disappear. Random files in my home directory get lost and pushed into successive corners. This, doing double duty as my web page, is at least something I won't lose.
And, of course, everybody's doing it. I'm not going to flatter myself into thinking that many people are ever going to read this, or that I might become a Dave Winer or InstaPundit, but I might make my small contribution to this distributed reinvention of the BBS with more uniformly competent writing. There is also small incremental value in participating in Google's global reputation server input set.
I could've used livejournal, but the temptation to abandon would be much greater, and using livejournal is sort of embarrassing for someone with the resources to run his own machine. I'm writing my own software because it's a diversion, and nothing out there did precisely what I wanted, and it probably wasn't any more work to adapt other people's code than to write my own. (I'll just keep telling myself that...)
And I'm really not writing for this as much as I should, to achieve the above ends. I actually have a collection of links that I want to blather about, I just seed to sit down and assemble them into entries. And on consideration, there are various technical ways I could make things easier. And, of course, I'm going to tell you about them (see above, about a place to write things down):
At the moment, I create an entry by editing it in emacs
in psgml-html-mode, as part of an html file that gets thrown
away (this in theory provides somewhat correct html, and provide a
good opportunity to remember to run a spelling checker). Then I log
into my server, and run a command-line utility and paste the entry
into it. Then I run the command to regenerate the html files.
Then I reread the (live) results in a web browser,
and invariably find grammar errors, typos and paste-os that made it
past ispell. Then, if I remember, I hit the bookmarks that ping
technorati and
weblogs.com.
Causes the phrase "fraught with peril" to come to mind, don't it?
What I want is something that starts with an emacs buffer running
something like psgml-html-mode, but that does some
amount of validation without needing <html> and
<body> tags (the ability to cleverly hide the
attributes of, say, <a> tags would nice too).
Automatically turning on flyspell-mode is simple and
easy to forget. When I hit C-c C-c, it should do an
extra-paranoia xhtml validation step, then ship the text somewhere
that causes it to get rendered like my weblog in whatever web browser
I have handy. Then I should have a "publish" button
that causes the entry to written to the final output location, ping
the meta-sites, and eventually do auto-trackback.
All this should reduce the friction for entries like this one as much as possible. For link dumps and their ilk, I want a "blog this" button in my browser and my RSS reader. It should let me type in a small amount of accompanying text (in a dialog, or on a web page) and stash the results and whatever other metadata is has handy somewhere. This information could then be retrieved into the above utility and processed into a proper entry.
Ooh, stories on code to write. Now I just need to find the time. I should at least get another entry out of the details. :-)
