new year's resolution more preparations
This new blogging setup, with the new domain, new feeds, and ideally
new workflow, suggest the analysis of what was problematic with the
old one.
Back when I was a PhD student, doing everything I could to avoid work
on my thesis, I stumbled upon a culture of Lisp and Free Software
developers – which may only come across as half ridiculous now but in
2001 seemed doubly counter-cultural. And so I joined a blogging
platform for Free Software types that also happened to double as a
testbed for trust metric research. And at the time, this offered neat
features not easily available elsewhere: the word “blog” itself was
only about two years old, and pertelote
maintained a blog by hand for years, so having somewhere which would
host my writing, and which moreover had some of the Social Network
about it (the advogato userbase was responsible for certification of
individuals' contribution to Free Software, and several of my then
collaborators were on advogato before me) was ideal.
The principal downside for me, then as now, is the use of web browsers
as the interface for text entry; a <textarea>
just isn't rich enough
in functionality. The situation is better now than it was – (mostly)
gone are the days when an incautious C-q
would instantly close all
browser windows, including the one in which your meticulously-crafted
draft was waiting for final polish before being submitted as a diary
entry – but it's still a long way from using my text editor,
moderately customized to my way of working, with all the comfort that
that brings.
Meanwhile, for work, I've successfully used
ikiwiki to document the processes and data
around some of my academic administrative responsibilities over the
years: postgraduate tutor, employability coordinator, director of
postgraduate studies (the reality is even less glamorous than these
titles); it's been really nice to be able to update documents while
not at my desk, or while commuting, and even if I have never grown to
love mercurial (ikiwiki's at-one-time default DVCS backend) it is at
least worth knowing.
So when contemplating how to set up systems less likely to impede my
productivity, it's perhaps natural that I should return to a recent
success, and set up an ikiwiki instance. This time, though, I'm
(obviously) explicitly using ikiwiki's
support for blogging as well as its
natural wiki nature; the idea is that the weblog is for
timely, pertinent comments, while the wiki is for
incrementally-refined notes on all subjects – probably replacing my
org-mode note-taking habit, which while lovely relies too much on
having a single emacs instance available at all times for when
inspiration strikes. I fully expect to keep the org-mode setup I have
for Getting (Some) Things Done, but will likely migrate the
non-actionable notes I have to this wiki as and when.
Speaking of new feeds, the advogato tag will be punned
into denoting content that should be syndicated to
my diary on advogato.
It's perhaps inevitable that something will go wrong, and including
html tags in the text of the first syndicated entry is an excellent
way to ensure that that happens, so if there's an editable textarea,
escaped less-than and greater-than signs, or a sentence that seems to
be missing something, then the Unix-Haters among the readers can
reminisce about seeing >From
in their e-mails oh wait
that still happens...
Syndicated 2013-12-28 17:11:25 from notes