Three Levels of Expression

Russell said in “In praise of fragments” that “blogging is about momentum and ‘more considered’ makes momentum harder” and I’m with him on that.

I have a system, albeit one suffering from some technical issues (my production CMS was designed to generation static files and never got a decent admin interface) which I hope to resolve soon (I have Catalyst running on my production server, and I have the software almost written to take over a couple of bits of my website).

Tweets are transitory, and short. I have ideas that can’t fit into 140 characters, and I feel guilty if I spill over into multiple tweets.

So, to blogging. Blogging needs a front end, it gets squished into Atom, and squished into webpages and squished into content’s pages. I’ve using Tumblr as an interface between me & my blog. I am going to replace it with some Catalyst (removing the need to boot the laptop which currently hosts my CMS and tell it to suck down from Tumblr, rebuild and push out — the legacy of moving between systems and not investing the time in cleaning up the mess sooner).

Where was I? Oh yes. A front end makes it easy to bash some content out, to let ideas flow, and to stop holding on to thoughts until you can find the time to express them the way you really want.

Then we come to the polish. I want to be able to express some ideas with polish. I want to include example pages. I don’t want the publication date to be considered highly important. I don’t want the content to drift down into the depths just because it was written a long time ago. My documents about basic CSS centring and inheritance account for over a third of the hits to my website by themselves.

Perhaps Twitter is my in and out trays, blogging is my file cabinet and I’m left wanting a bookcase to show off the things I really care about.

And perhaps, just perhaps, I should take a leaf out of “The death of the boring blog post?” and stop being quite so consistent with how I format that stuff which I care about.

As the new CMS takes over, I think I may be looking at alternative ways to handle the articles section of my site.