Sat 10 Jun 2006

3, 2, 1... sshhh

Time to launch this thing, I guess. A bit anti-climactic really. No all-star party, no popular magazine coverage, not even a few friends around for some beers. Just push it out into the ether and listen for the splash. Yet another blog way down there in the very long tail.

Like all self-written software projects, this one is not complete. There are a number of things I do not like about the current site and an even larger number of things in the TODO list as enhancements. But they can all be fixed later. It works well enough for a 0.1 release. By setting the current iteration free onto the web, I will hopefully prevent certain online friends greeting me with "do you have a blog yet?" and we can return to the more traditional "hello" form. I will have my own soapbox and a place in which to centralise all those things I want to write about.

I like to write. I am not necesarily particularly good at it, but I can usually get my point across. And I like explaining things to others. So with any luck, there might be a few instructional and tutorial articles floating around here in a bit. In a previous blog I had at Advogato, I realised I had drifted away from the purpose of being entertaining and was mostly using it to rant. I deliberately stopped posting there for just that reason. I aim to reign in those impulses here. Most importantly, this will hopefully keep me in practice. A writer is somebody who writes. It is only succesful writers who generally need to be able to write well (although even that is not a universal requirement).

There is no particular thread to what I want to write about. Some of my favourite online sites do have a common theme, whether that is the author's intention or not. But there are also some good collections of less tightly linked knowledge around, too (I am intentionally not including links here; later maybe, but for now, my preferences remain my own). I have decided just to write about whatever interests me at the moment, whilst trying to avoid the Friday Cat Blogging style of noise (guess you need to have comments enabled for that one to work in any case). If my interests do not match yours, no harm done. I'm sure there are other places you can visit on the World Wide Web -- it's pretty much big by definition.

So let's see what happens. Hopefully it's enjoyable to the audience, even if only in the same way as watching disaster movies presents a nice distraction. Questions, comments, offers of large amounts of money can all be sent to my first name at pointy-stick.com. One day there will be a comment system here (I have a couple of tweaks I want to make to Django's existing setup first) and even support for those new-fangled pingback or trackback things all the cool kids seem to have. But for now, it's read-only.

Topics: meta/blog