So I decided to resurrect this weblog
. Or, should I say, this giant mess of crap that I've decided I now hate. Everyone always
says that rolling your own weblog engine is a stupid idea but I did it anyway because, well, I was stupid. It
was stupid when I put it together originally and it was stupid yesterday, when I spent a few hours moving
everything from Python w/ a brain-dead file based data store to Ruby, Rails, and MySQL…
Dumb.
I should have grabbed Mephisto instead. No, I should have did wordpress.com and just let this place go.
I should never have gotten out of bed this weekend.
A long time ago, I had a bunch of novel ideas like tagging and bookmark integration, and some other things I never got around to doing. Today, most weblog software has all that stuff but I've decided it doesn’t matter because it’s all stupid. I wanted all my crap (bookmarks, articles, essays, smaller weblog entries, etc) in the same place and tagged so that I could combine tags in the URL, a la del.icio.us, and have these ad-hoc pages filtered using this mini URL based query language. I spent way too much time implementing all this crap and then never used it. Not once.
It’s a stupid idea.
Did I mention you could grab an Atom feed for any combination of tags? How cool is that?
It’s not. I never used it. Not once. It’s been ripped out.
There are exactly three things that matter on a weblog. In order of importance, they are:
- “Permalink” / real content pages.
- Archives.
- The main feed.
Anything else becomes a minor annoyance at best (blogrolls, what’s on your record player, the weather in your zip code, etc). Weblog navigation using tags, on the other hand, is almost entirely annoying and tag clouds as a navigational device is quite possibly the worst of 50 really stupid options.
All of the aforementioned have a place, of course, just not on your weblog. If you want to tag stuff, do it on del.icio.us. Want to broadcast what’s currently on your record player? Do it on last.fm. Blogrolling goes here. What people read on your site can be found on reddit.
Coming into harmony with the web means accepting that each end should do exactly one thing well. The weblog is for writing (or publishing anyway — Emacs is for writing), everything that’s not your weblog is for everything else.
So, should time permit, I'm going to completely redesign this place to be totally bleeding edge. I'm going to attempt to emulate what is quite possibly the greatest technical weblog on the planet: Kragen’s TOL.
Discuss
Dude, you're going to give me an ego problem.
Right now not very many people read kragen-tol. There are 111 email subscribers, and about 110 people read it on the web each day. (According to
grep /pipermail/kragen-tol /var/log/apache/lists.canonical.org-access.log.1 | awk '$11 != "'\\\\\"-\\\\\"'" {print $1}' | sort -u | wcwhich currently says 846 unique IP addresses for a week. Taking out the “–” criterion, which eliminates hits without referrers, gives 1470; presumably the extra hits are mostly Googlebot and friends, rather than you clicking on one of your bookmarks.)I speculate that more people would read kragen-tol if it wasn’t such a pain in the butt to read. If it had a blog-style front page instead of requiring three clicks to see anything worth reading, if you could see the comments on the same page instead of having to run off to a different mailing list archive, if you could find the later related posts on the same subject, if it was available in HTML paragraphs instead of
<pre>elements, if it were searchable — I speculate that more people would read it and link to it.There are very few links on the web to kragen-tol postings. I speculate that this is related to the problems listed above.
I keep thinking that one of these days I'll fix all these organizational problems. Haven’t done it yet, though.
— Kragen Sitaker on Sunday, February 18, 2007 at 02:00 PM #
test-tube
— Timmy on Wednesday, April 09, 2008 at 03:02 PM #
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