8:26 PM 4/18/2007

I decided - and this is going to cause me a lot of trouble, mind you - to write my own blogging tool for my site. It turns out that I'm a difficult person in many ways. And one of these ways is that I turn my nose up at the existing tools. I could be like design snobs - those people with a superiority complex who can't be bothered to stoop to inferior tools - but I'm not one of those. I see the spectrum of good design / bad design, but that has nothing to do with me. I gravitate to anachronisms. Let me start designing, and maybe it will become clear.

I don't just need a blog tool. I need a database. But, now I have a database, so what I really need is a document management system. I write journal entries, with a chronological structure. But, I write a lot of essays on a particular subject, so I need keyword tagging. And, yes, all these things are available to me already, but I've used the existing tools, and they never make me happy. They never feel right 'in my hand'.

I plan to make my site amorphous: a document display system, and widgets. I hope I can make it look snazzy, but the function is for me alone. Who knows - maybe someone will want to imitate it.

Right now I'm using Inforgami and it was hand-rolled by some nerd to meet a need - perhaps we will never know what that need was. For all the textbook talk about separating content and presentation, they're always being conflated by their very nature. Like words without speech or an idea in no language, there isn't any content at all with no presentation. And the presentation you choose puts serious strain on what content will abide. They don't build buildings from a poem an architect wrote. And, you wouldn't hold a press conference in braille - but you could if it somehow became necessary - if all other routes were cut off. Infogami was absolutely free, and then it broke. The guys who run it haven't posted any blog posts in months. If it comes down (and it could happen any moment), all this writing could evaporate. I do have ways to back it up, but then it would all be chronically off-line until I took the time and effort to breath life back into it. I didn't sign any legal contracts that I know of. They are not under any real obligation to save my creative efforts. That is what convinced me to buy my domain name in the first place.

I presume that the Infogami guys did essentially what I plan to do: every page is an instance of the template, and markup text stored with a filename. There is probably one enormous flat file for my account. Plenty of file names to go around, as I explored before.

It reminds me a lot of my database textbook. And it also reminds me of a strange history anecdote I can't place where some grad students contemplated abandoning files altogether in Unix. We're saddled with the file. It's a bit late to change everyone over to another model. In the anecdote, they regret their decision. We can't go back.

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