So I’ve been asked three times in the past 48 hours, Why the move to WordPress? It’s a fair question, though it’s reminiscent of the question people asked me a few years ago, Why are you moving off LiveJournal? What’s so important about setting up your own blog?
That one worked out pretty good, though; a quick check of the stats:
| Google Page Rank | Site |
|---|---|
| 8 | blogs.sun.com/jonathan |
| 7 | blogs.sun.com/richb |
| 6 | www.crypticide.com/dropsafe |
| 6 | blogs.sun.com/davew |
| 6 | blogs.sun.com |
| 5 | blogs.sun.com/alecm |
…so alone I am doing as well as the blogs.sun.com homepage and some of my peers – but without requiring the gravity of Sun’s corporate domain backing me up.
I may not be on Jonathan or Rich’s turf yet, but hey, I post a lot less.
Ah yes – whilst I am on that topic, why has that been, some have asked?
I have been richocheting around like a superball for the past few months; my 87yo father broke his leg in a fall in January, had the bone plated and pinned, and has been in and out of hospital ever since. After recuperations at various hospitals which gave him bedsores, MRSA, C.Diff, cellulitis, a variety of other diseases and some type-2 diabetes-related problems, it started to look like dementia. He was confused, distraught, not sleeping, behaving badly and on the verge of being sectioned before my sisters – who have been working their socks off – whipped him away to a place where he could be looked-after properly.
There his blood sugar has been brought under control, and the confusion found to be an artefact of repeated UTIs brought on by bladder stones. To say he’s responded well to treatment is an understatement given how bad matters were; mentally he’s back to being pin-sharp, but now comes the much delayed exercise and recuperation from the broken leg.
So we’re not out of the woods yes.
Then there’s been my discovery of Twitter, Facebook, and all the other new social-media tools which in retrospect suck my energy and focus away from my main blog; stuff gets Twittered which really warrants a posting, and I believe this is leading to fragmentation in the blogging community.
This makes me wonder: people’s content is becoming dispersed, you have to be on all the networks to get a picture of your friends, so we can extrapolate: unless people start running “Personal Aggregators” real soon, splicing their Tweets and whatnot into their main blog RSS feeds, blogging will lose its focus and start to fade – because Facebook is not the be-all and end-all of social media. But then blogging’s gonna fade and morph anyway. Maybe this is how? Maybe this is the end of the beginning?
Sigh.
Then there was the week’s vacation in Indiana; interesting, fun, radio stations telling me all about “The Rapture”, and something of a respite from normal life – plus I got to hang out with a lot of friends: Brad, Val, Mark, Jon, Sar, Keith, Wendy, Spaf… and finally I’ve been spending a lot of time visiting some wonderful people in London, which has been nice while it has lasted.
So in the past year since the motorbike accident I’ve learned a lot about the world, about other people, and about myself. Some of it has been eye-opening. I’ve learned about politics, people and places. How very differently people can perceive the same world in which you live, or indeed how they can perceive yourself in the context of your world.
I’ve even met people who call themselves geeks, and who are certainly geeky, but who are not like many of my geek friends with whom I share values. Whatever else Eric Raymond may have done, I believe he hit the nail squarely on the head when describing the Hacker personality type, so maybe not all Geeks are Hackers, which was not something that had previously struck me as a possibility.
So back to WordPress – why?
- It’s pretty.
- It’s free.
- I dicked around with writing my own, and although the template-driven stuff is easy, making CSS look good atop that is truly an art form.
- From old-DropSafe I developed some interesting ideas on spam-prevention, and if I implement them on something popular then everyone can benefit.
Simple, eh?
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