Here's a job for the x-ism blog

Christian Crumlish

RFB’s focus has been drifting and to give it coherence, besides just becoming an RSS aggregator of my other feeds, I think I’ll go back to trying to document my PEP (personal expression platform) project there, including some organizational stuff, some IA ideas, but first, mostly a bunch of scans of sketches I’ve done over the last five years.

But in general I’ve been pulling out archival stuff and feeling like I ought to bring it closer to the surface or expose it otherwise and as part of PEP I’ve got to deal with a trail of episode personal blogs (or online journals), ultimately transmigrating them all into X-POLLEN so they can be indexed there or maybe sticking Textpattern php tags onto existing pages so the spigots will pour out coherent navigational and indexifying goodness? We’ll see.

I’ve got so many things to do that moving old blogs is actually kind of low on the list, and usually I like to patch what’s there when possible. Maybe add a page pointing people to the new place or the old one or the sequence or whatever. Band-aids.

On the other hand, I can also just pore through the stuff like a human being and select out stuff that can be pointed to again now or re-printed if compelling enough.

My first personal blog journal thingy was Breathing Room, and it was not automated at all. It has a rather elegant structure if I do say so myself. And it was very easy to maintain. I had a little template. New entries were ordered by date and then a symbolic link changed the home page to the newest entry. The now second page would get its forward navigation uncommented. That was it. Life was so simple then.

I kept all the illustrations (my usual scanned doodles and such) in an /art/ subdirectory and today I made an index page just to highlight all the art as a kind of electronic museum show. I’ll probably keep tweaking the page till I’m happy, but that’s the kind of easy step I was thinking of to bind stuff together without the total surgical laser precision of the ultimate perfect plan.

So besides getting around to upgrading the beta and figuring out why my archive pages don’t work etc., over here on this workmanlike x-ism place I suppose I’ll also occasionally highlight interesting finds from my blog or offline archives here (and of course syndicate them at RFB).

(Link to breathing art)