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25 May 2006
A new haven for the musings maven and how I love tooting my own horn
In spite of all my apprehensions about the adverse effects of the Internet on the way we think, speak and write I am convinced now that there are some technological advances that are indeed for the better. For the last two years, I have in these pages tried to resist the pull of popular 'publishing tools' such as TypePad, Movable Type, Wordpress and so on and have only relied on these bare hands to conjure a modicum of the conveniences they afford. My first dabbling into these affairs in the month of April in 2003 resulted in the three column design with some links for permanent use by the left and links that were relevant to the entry by the right, juxtaposed alongside the corresponding entry. Subsequently, in May 2004 I conceded a point to the weblog movement when it became apparent to me that a long page full of incoherent rambling would not amount to much when it came to archiving. Even back then, I toyed around with the notion of moving to a full-fledged publishing system but the idea of giving up much of my editorial freedom on how the content appeared alongwith the appalling notion of having to put up with content advertising immediately put paid to any such designs I had. Instead, I decided to plod through this the hard way -- I set up an indigenous 'permalink' system whereby after each entry was written up and thoroughly vetted for typographical, factual and literary shortcomings, and this usually happened at the time of the next update to the journal, I would set in place an arduous sequence of operations: copy the relevant entry and paste it into a 'permalink' template, then index the new 'permalink' on a separate index, then catalogue the 'permalink' in the RSS feed and finally update the main page with a link to the same.Also, I had to make sure that the main page itself did not go on endlessly. So, from time to time -- a rough basis was a trimester, but there have been longer periods as well largely because of inactivity -- I would catharsise the main page, splicing away entries made during that period into a separate subpage. I then had of course to index that page and update the set-up on the main page. What a tedious chore, no doubt -- extremely painstaking, draining and largely pointless. But still, it had to be done and I did it. Slowly however, it also disincentivised my wanting to write anything at all. At first, I was persuaded to resort to block-writing the entries but subsequently with other calls to my time and efforts and with a slower network infrastructure at home I began to abhor this entire Frankensteinian process of mine. Time and again, I kept going back to check on updates in the content-management system world for solutions to my conundrum. All I needed was to pursue a largely minimalist design with as little change as possible to the content layout and something that did not make too many impositions on the nature of services supported by the webserver but alas, it was all in vain. Mine was a very peculiar problem and, apparently not interesting enough to warrant a market product.
In the meantime, in March last year I had acquired a new laptop laying to waste my old and trusty Toshiba Satellite 3000-S353 -- a companion I have had all of nearly five years now. Back in 2001 when Francis and I purchased our machines, doubtless we were the first among many to acquire laptops, the Toshiba Satellite 3000-S353 was the state-of-the-art. It has a Pentium 800MHz chip, with 256MB RAM and 20GB hard disk space. It came with Windows ME which, for some strange reason, I never thought of uninstalling even after making Linux my operating system of choice all through those five years and even after two other computer systems (my Dell office workstation and the Compaq laptop) coming into my possession -- both carrying Windows XP, even if not the best solution, at least the better one. Simultaneously, I had heard a lot about Ubuntu and had been wanting to check it out. It was then, that the penny dropped -- all I had to do was to make my laptop the webserver, set up everything that a standard, simple, no-frills content management system -- say Wordpress -- would need, which was Apache2, MySQL and PHP. Of course, there was lull in between on account of Parichaya when all the time I had went either towards working on the movie or on research. Finally though, I managed to set up Ubuntu's Breezy Badger 5.10 -- oh, what a charming and nifty piece of software it is! -- quite easily, and subsequently all the necessary auxiliary tools. The machine already had a name from a long time ago -- I remember a phase of a full month last year when I had to use only Kapi because of a 'thermal error' on the Dell motherboard (those 'permalinks' can be quite handy!) -- and I was online without needing to mediate with a séance.
Setting up Wordpress was the next order of business which I managed to get through last evening. But perhaps, the most important task was to find the right design. At first, this seemed daunting and I had almost resigned myself to having to come up with something on my own. Luckily however, Wordpress has a great theme-design community -- even though I settled on a rather simple, absolutely spartan theme called the 3c-seo. This was not my first choice and I continued to grapple with how I would get the 'Daily links' and the 'Permanent links' incorporated into the new design. Tinkering around with the sidebar's PHP script was out of the question -- I had now become a rapid convert to more automating of content-generation and was loathe to have to go back to old ways. I found a perfect solution; in fact the solution I ought to have had in the very first place when I was toying around with those link-things -- footnotes with links in them. Wordpress impressed with a plugin that did exactly that: Linknotes.
A constant lamentation on my part all through these years has been how there were times when I had no opportunity to write an entry into the journal, but yet I was ferociously collecting bookmarks on del.icio.us. While not exactly a labour of love, my compilation of bookmarks on del.icio.us is something I pride myself in. I now had the freedom of assimilating more of my del.icio.us persona onto the journal, thanks to del.icio.us linkrolls and tagrolls. The added benefit to absorbing those bookmarks was that I managed to circumvent the problem of posting my 'Permanent links' on the left sidebar by merely using a specific tag (.perm) on the del.icio.us bookmarks and importing that onto the journal main page.
Finally, the movie reviews page that I maintain separately has been languishing without an update for a while. I lay blame again squarely on the opportunity cost involved in opening up a text editor and writing over a relatively slow network connection. The new set-up now gives me the luxury of tags -- it will always amaze me when I think how we managed to pass through an entire decade of the Internet and the Web without them -- and that means I can combine the movie reviews into the general flux of things.
All that was the technical mumbo-jumbo. These pages are now more than three years old and have seen several facelifts, spurts of intense activity followed by long phases of absence, different cycles of fall, winter, spring, summer and fall, the (second?) wettest winter ever, many concerts, many cooking and household experiments, many glorious Tests, many homages, obituaries and observations on death, holdings-forth on language, reflections on the quaint and charming ways of the BBC and on the tragedy of journalism, sublime music, horrific tragedy, political zeitgests, incomplete travelogues, literary disquisitions (in particular the compelling effect of Jane Austen and her body of work on modern society and television), nostalgic reminiscences and of course personal achievements.
I cannot claim that I will miss the austere measures I had to undertake in order to contribute to these pages, but it has certainly been quite a trip. Nonetheless, onwards and upwards onto a new domain.
