Elements or Lower

In an attempt to cultivate more focussed blogging habits for myself, I’ve now added a companion tumblelog to this one, tentatively entitled element->down();.

With what amounted to an amorphous clog of small links and snippets finally being posted somewhere they belong, I’m hoping I may be able to more regularly attend to meatier blethering here. We’ll see.

…at least for a while. I’m trying out Haloscan to see if it allows me to manage comment spam rather more successfully than my old system did. As you were.

We’ll see how long this lasts, but at least there’s a fresh design to sweep away the cobwebs, if not the inane burbling about Doctor Who that’s been riding high here for, oh, about seven months now.

This year’s been fantastic, and possibly the busiest on record, both personally and professionally. That’s a terrible excuse for hopelessly abandoning this site, but at least it means that I now have a pleasing backlog of things I want to write about.

First up: reworking the Woking site in CSS.

My dedication to this blogging lark is nothing less than extraordinary. The moment a spot of fairly intense work comes along, I abandon the whole thing in favour of scrabbling to meet deadlines. Although things have barely calmed down now, I need to either resume posting or close the blog down altogether. Here’s plumping for another go at it, at least for a further couple of months.

In the meantime, the comment spam has reached frankly alarming proportions. I’d occasionally run through the “writeback” files kept by my blogging system, Blosxom, to clean out the comment spam, but this is a tiresome, manual process — and I just can’t keep up. Coupled with the fact that the comment system on this blog has never worked completely to my liking, I’ve decided to remove the comment facility altogether. I’d like to thank the people responsible for the handful of genuine comments that have been posted, and roast the people responsible for the rest on an inadequately-buttered spit.

So after probably a full year of dithering, I finally start my blog. I’ve had this domain kicking about for even longer than that, originally with the intent of creating a site around a set of short stories I had in mind, entitled Elements or Lower. The idea of the stories was that each would explore a different topic fundamental to what makes a person a person — memory, sensory perception, self-identity and so on. I never got round to writing more than a couple, even though the idea for the series of stories is around ten years old now.

Unbelievably, that’s not even me at my most pretentious. Go back a further five or six years, to being a teenager, and we get into some truly awful territory. I had the opportunity to look back through my GCSE English coursework a few weeks ago, where I’d submitted a fairly substantial wad of creative writing I’d undertaken with sincere self-belief and an alternating obsession between the basis of a novel exploring the mythology of Ancient Egypt and (even more worryingly) a set of songs I’d written with my friend James that had no small basis in, of all things, science fiction. James was responsible for the music, and the couple of songs he wrote himself in the same period are just fine. He is therefore exonerated entirely from the project. I pity the poor examiners for having to trudge through it all. Part of me wonders if they saw the coursework folder and gave me a mark purely on the basis of volume.

Anyway, I finally had to admit that I wasn’t about to ever make use of this domain for its original intent, and felt that I might be able to commandeer it for a blog. I wanted to start around a year ago, at the start of my project at work to expand upon my Content Management System for Woking Borough Council. I thought it would be interesting to document the design and implementation process of their new, bespoke CMS.

It would’ve been, an’ all. Each small decision turned into a big can of worms, and I’d like to visit some of them in retrospect over the coming weeks. But I didn’t start blogging it all when I’d wanted because I’d started the actual job, and I thought at the time that when I started a blog, I’d have liked to have written the software that runs it as well. Having now finished the CMS project (more or less), I’ve now reconsidered the wisdom of writing one’s own blogging software as well.

So I decided that, as a member of the Perl faithful, I should redress the overbalance of laziness and hubris with a touch more impatience, and just get on with it at last.

Hello!