Banalities?

Posted Sun Aug 21, 2011 in

SpicesWhat to write? That has been a question for me for weeks now. This space is rapidly closing on the ten-year mark. There are over 3,000 postings on a variety of topics. My interest ranges widely.

But I’m not sure where to go from here. The year is a mess. Wife’s cancer and uncertainty at work (whether justified or not) — I’m left not knowing what to do, other than post banalities or forwarded funnies.

I’m not really satisfied with either of those, but I hate to let the site languish like some set-aside lover. What was interesting and good and fun and easy is not so easy now. Facebook and Twitter seem to have drained the life from weblogs, except those that are paid works, which seem to grow exponentially in number and decrease in content geometrically, simultaneously.

I’m writing a great deal, just not here. My journals are very busy tools and my rediscovered love of fountain pens provides lots of interesting things to write.

So, what do I do? I believe I either have to do something with the space, or off-load all of my text and images to archive and take it down. It doesn’t seem right to leave it to languish, drifting off into the morass of link-rot and slow death of banality.

The bright spot of this post is the image. It was something that caught my eye (so to speak) while browsing an antique shop. Settings like this fascinate me.

  1. Weblogs are still better for long-form material. I keep mine up (note new URL) and post links to it from FB. I’m not a Twitter user; for me it’s like trying to swallow a fire hose.

    — Linkmeister    21 August 2011, 23:24    #

  2. You’re right about the long-form material and I think weblogs are better for images too. I’m not comfortable handing off my images to FB and it can’t keep uploads from my mobile phone straight.

    I want to be able to bring my Flickr photos here, but can’t find a plug-in for Textpattern that will do that, at least not yet. I search periodically, but haven’t found anything. I’m not up to a CMS switch at this time or I would go to Wordpress or TypePad.

    I have a very short Twitter list. It’s more like a garden hose. It can get away from me, but I don’t obsess over it. FB is the same way for me and I’m considering culling my friends list.

    Thanks for the thoughts.

    — ruminator    22 August 2011, 03:34    #

  3. My switch to WP was about three hours of work. The actual export/import was about 10 minutes; it was the setup that was time-consuming.

    However, I did find that Movable Type and WP use different UTF or Unicode versions or something, because a lot of my old blockquotes didn’t import dashes and quotation marks within them; I’ve had to fix those as I run across them. Some line breaks didn’t take, either. There’s a way to fix that ahead of time; I just didn’t take advantage of it.

    — Linkmeister    24 August 2011, 22:18    #