In Which Our Hero Arrives In The 21st Century
20 April 2008 | 12:15 AM
Bear in mind as you read this post that I am a web software programmer, and as such am supposed to be imbued with some serious technical kung fu spanning all things computing. The truth is, generally I am able to suss out what’s what technically, if for no other reason than I have very little fear of pressing buttons and checking checkboxes and the like to find out what they do.
In each of my previous incarnations as a blogger, I always (as we say in the biz) “rolled my own” when it came to the nanopublishing software behind the websites. Even though lots of sturdy, popular and often free blogging tools were widely available each time I tackled a new blog project, I instead seized upon the opportunity to write the software myself so I could gain as much knowledge and technical competence in the matter as possible. In fact, it’s at least partly true to say that the challenge of the technical implementation of the blogs has been at least a sizable chunk of their genesis in the first place, often with a desire to tell the world what I ate for breakfast or which celebrity’s areolae I find most appealing.
That said, I’m sort of (again, as we say in the biz) “over it”, at least when it comes to prising apart the mechanisms behind the blogging tools to see what makes them tick. As it turns out, writing your own blog software is dead simple, but the effort that goes into maintaining it and adding new features makes one begin to resent it after a while, and soon the mere act of posting content feels like walking-on-eggshells, don’t-rock-the-boat experience, focused less on providing new stuff for people to read and more on making sure nothing breaks. In any case, I’ve now officially built enough of these things – both for personal and professional use – that there’s no longer any thrill involved in putting them together. Suddenly, those existing tools and/or blogging platforms that are out there which make all the magic happen me seem infinitely more desirable than writing even a single blog-related line of code.
And so, for this site, I’ve decided to embrace WordPress, the ubiquitous open-source blogging tool that’s so easy and pervasive I’m fairly sure my 95 year-old grandmother uses it for her site, and she’s dead. Let me state for the record that before tackling this site, I had never spent any real time looking at the underlying systems behind the major players in this software space: I’ve never used LiveJournal. I last used Blogger so long ago that they’ve changed platforms, toolsets and parent companies at least twice. And I’d never before done a darned thing in WordPress, aside from set it up for a customer or two to use as their blogging tool. Needless to say, these tools are quite advanced now. WordPress, for example, is quite polished and fairly idiot-proof: once I became familiar with its semantics (unfamiliar to me only because I typically rolled my own and thus invented my own), things became quite easy. One feature in particular has stood out, though. A feature that, had I put it into place in my previous blogs, would’ve probably caused me to avoid endless amounts of self-inflicted grief. Heck, I’d made use of this tool back then, I might not even find myself divorced! (I kid because I care). What is this wondrous, mystical feature you ask? Why, it’s none other than the magic “Keep this post private” checkbox, right there on the post composition screen:
Look at that! Imagine, everything I type and say doesn’t have to be broadcast to the world wide interwebs, and can instead be just for little ol’ me (or possibly other users I allow) to look back upon with equal parts amusement, dismay, horror and regret! I must say that I feel like an absolute moron for not thinking of such a checkbox in my old software, and and even more of a dummy for having used WordPress now for a number of weeks and failed to notice the checkbox’s existence, right under my nose.
It’s a very cool (and in my case, exceedingly necessary!) piece of functionality that I’ve already made use of. I must admit, however, that I always start humming the soundtrack score from Doogie Howser M.D., from that point in the show where he’d be entering platitudes into his computerized diary-thingy.
Posted by Andy in Navel Gazing