It’s that time of year
Yes, it’s that time of year already — Summer — time for me to not feel like blogging as much, and for me to have my annual state of angst wrt my blogging platform. It was almost exactly a year ago that I began the last excursion into exploration & evaluation…
For some reason, once again this year, I’m feeling ambivalent towards Wordpress. Version 2.2 was released about a month ago, and I still haven’t upgraded. I’m feeling like my current installation (including my template/design) is overly bloated & top-heavy with cruft, in the form of too many plugins & too much stuff/junk installed. Junk that just doesn’t serve any real, functional purpose.
One thing that’s also different this year is that I’m not feeling overly attached to the 850+ posts that I currently have in the archives. Being tied to having those posts available severely restricts my options & flexibility, and I’m very much leaning towards making a clean break & starting over. Or, if I decide to stay with Wordpress, at the very least going through & deleting some of the more superfluous entries, so that I’m left with a more solid & useful archive.
Right now, I’ve worked my way into a (all too common) bit of a frenzy, having installed instances of the following so that I can play around with & evaluate them:
- Wordpress 2.2 - clean install
- b2evolution
- Nucleus
- Serendipity
- Movable Type 4 (beta)
- Textpattern
There are pluses & minuses to all of them, and I’m still working through in my head exactly what I want out of a blogging engine this go-around. Much of what I wrote last year will still apply (but I’ve got to go and re-read it, so that I can get an idea about what, if anything, has changed…).
[Note to TK: Don't worry, this won't have any real effect on Katie's Beer --- as long as you want to keep it like it currently is, you've got it. You won't need to worry about changing unless/until you decide you want to...]
-ghp
If this had only been known earlier…
See, now, if this had been realized/figured out earlier, I think blogging would’ve taken off much, much sooner! 
-ghp
Beggars All ist tot
Beggars All — long a bastion of quality in the Lutheran blogosphere — is dead & gone.
Read this thread at LutherQuest for some details.
They’ve struggled with the factors that drove them to shut things down for good before (as I recall the “sabbatical” from a year or so ago…), so this isn’t completely surprising to me.
It does, however, leave me conflicted. And, I must be honest, it angers me. I think they’ve copped out a bit. I think the argument that blogging and/or the internet is a “black hole” is disingenuous at worst and wrong-headed at best. Neither do I think that the vocation-based argument is all that valid.
I just wanted to get this entry out, as both a statement of thanks for the good that Beggars All did in the blogosphere, and as an expression of my immediate/raw reaction to its demise.
It’s a damn shame.
It’s possible that I’ll more fully develop my thoughts, particularly if there are any comments that warrant such efforts. But it’s also possible that I won’t.
‘Cause, after all, I’m just a softie who blogs about inconsequential stuff like realitytv & other stuff that merely interests me…
Feh.
-ghp
Ouch…
[NOTE: The numbers below were accurate prior to the Territorial Purging of the Archives in Sept 2007...]
From a recent posting over at Random Thoughts of a Confessional Lutheran:
“That being said, I have a new pet peeve: reality TV blogging. Please people. If you want to watch the stuff, fine, but don’t expect me to be reading your posts anymore. I’ve seen two good bloggers turn to mush because of reality TV.”
Ouch. That’s gotta hurt those two unnamed bloggers…
Fwiw, I just ran the numbers since I started blogging just over 2 years ago, and here they are:
609 posts
156,000+ words
| Category | Total |
% |
Year 1 |
% |
Year 2 |
% |
| asides | 39 | 6 | 0 | 0 | 39 | 10 |
| culture | 82 | 13 | 34 | 11 | 48 | 12 |
| realitytv | 115 | 19 | 24 | 8 | 91 | 23 |
| general | 86 | 14 | 39 | 13 | 47 | 12 |
| technology | 35 | 6 | 16 | 5 | 19 | 5 |
| blogging | 57 | 9 | 24 | 8 | 33 | 8 |
| theology | 289 | 48 | 164 | 55 | 125 | 31 |
| 703 | 301 | 402 |
Note: The category numbers add up to 703, rather than 609, due to posts with multiple categories…
All things considered, I think that the numbers are interesting, insofar as they validate my perception that I’m still primarily a theology-pundit blogger, with a strong dash of pop-culture punditry blended in. And I’m cool with that…
-ghp
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