The META blog entry

Now, for the METABLOG entry! 

Why did it take so long for me to get a blog? It’s not like I am new to web publishing… I did my first web site around 1995 or 96. It’s still around at xena.ipns.com/~davest, and it’s LAUGHINGLY out of date. But, more about that later.

The main problem is that I knew EXACTLY what I wanted to do, but I couldn’t figure out how to get it done.

Here’s the deal – I have plenty of web sites, but none of them would allow me enough scripting support so I could install blogging software. I have a website at my ISP, and I own the  davest.com domain thanks to “free” hosting at catalog.com, and an internal website running on a little SuSE Linux server running in my office.

(How many home pages does one man need?)

So anyway, I wanted to host my own blog on my own site, but none of my web sites would host the software I needed to run it.  So, there I sat, stymied.

Another example of where the “best” is sometimes the enemy of the “good enough”!

Of course, the other consideration is, I wasn’t too motivated to crash the barriers and solve the problems, because of what annoys me about blogs.

So what’s wrong with the blogosphere?  Here are a few of my pet peeves:

• First off, if you want your very own blog, what’s your first step?  I looked into Blogspot at first. I was not particularly impressed. I have a friend who blogs at Typepad but that costs money, pfaugh! Then there are spaces at MSN, Yahoo, you name it. I finally was invited by oregonblondie to join this fine community, so here I am. But here’s the problem – all of these little islands of blogdom become isolated walled gardens which encourage you to have all of your friends in the same island. This is not what the Internet is supposed to be about – this is almost as bad as the IM wars!
• How many blog sites exist, but how many are actually being used? There is this implied task on everyone’s TODO list to update their blog. Gee, that’s fun, almost as fun as flossing or going to the gym. Please, I can’t stand the guilt. It’s like whoever took my preferred handle of davest on livejournal. (Thanks a lot, whoever you are!) The problem is, I don't have a lot of patience to put up with buggy software and the discipline of editing entries.
• My final pet peeve is more behavioral I guess. It’s the pattern I see of people posting their deepest and most intimate personal secrets into their blog for all the ‘net to see. Things that they would never reveal in person to a family member is publicly readable. And let’s not talk about the illicit affairs that start on blogs, the children who are exploited, on and on.

When it comes to writing down my deepest personal feelings, I do have a journal for that, but it’s written on paper with a fountain pen in a spiral notebook!  But more of this in a future entry.

OK, now that I have vented my spleen on this topic, I will try to be more constructive next time.

Dave