Blogs, diaries, reading, filtering
This was all pretty much doomed from the start. I don’t know what I’m doing with this site, and I don’t really have the inclination to care that much. I guess that I did the one big reorganization, but that left more gaps than it filled: the only way to get back to the main page (considered-harmful.com/index.html) from this one (considered-harmful.com/posts.html) is by navigating back using the URL or the back button in your browser. The text isn’t very hyper, is it? I don’t even have nay branding on this page besides the title. If you landed here by mistake you must have no idea where you are. On the other hand, I don’t know that anybody has ever landed here by mistake.
I’ve been reading about information architecture and responsive web design lately. It doesn’t show in this website, but I have been putting at least some thought into how to organize a website. At this point I can make a decent static site, but I know essentially nothing about styling it. In other words, I know some HTML, very little CSS, and basically no JS. Don’t even ask me about PHP or SQL or anything else. I can do XML and JSON decently, but that’s cheating.
Is it? JSON has a full top-level utility (jq(1)) whose filters I’ve been learning to use. I fiddled around with one JSON file from lipu linku, a toki pona dictionary, and made another from the CCRU’s pandemonium and numogram (someday I’ll show you my hypertext version of the numogram and pandemonium matrix). It’s very satisfying to be able slice and dice the information this way and that. It’s magical when the file you wrote gets returned to you filtered and sorted.
On the other hand, maybe it’s all pointless. I could have just used WordPress or Squarespace (ugh) to make this site. I could be hosting it on Git(Hub|Lab) pages (I still might—it’s a static site, after all). I could just be writing in my diary, which is where this all started. Maybe that’s the trick: what’s the difference between a diary and a blog? Is it possible to keep both? I pretty much stopped keeping a diary once I started this blog because whenever I have the urge to blast out a stream of consciousness piece I write it here rather than in the diary.
It’s hard to say what I’m writing about. I guess it’s my life and what I’m up to. But is that worth reading? I feel as though I should be commenting on things, or informing, or giving some sort of knowledge. What knowledge have I to give? I don’t think that this is the place, nor am I the person, for that. I’m trying to give some first-person data (is there such a thing) of what it’s like to be me, at this time, in this place. Maybe someday it’ll be of interest to someone.
