I’m having great trouble planning the web format for Volume Three of my online blogging thing. Which is not only to be expected – I haven’t started it yet – but also probably a good thing. So I’m using this post to try and bash out a few ideas.
Like the Texas blog it’s going to be written on my handheld on site. I was going to go all lo-fi and use pen and paper, but came to my senses. Not only would typing up notes be time consuming, especially if I’d been away from a computer for a month (which is the current plan), but it would also eradicate the spontaneity, which in the weblog form is all important. So I’ll be trying to keep a daily diary on the handheld which I’ll then upload every few weeks.
This leads to an issue. My raw material will be traditional weblog fodder – date stamped entries in chronological order – but they will be uploaded as a batch. Someone coming to the site regularly will see the same post over and over and then suddenly 20-30 at once, back dated. So I need to make it clear not only when the entry was written (to give it context) but also when it was actually published. The authored date is the more important for archival purposes so I’ll be using that. A solution to the user issue needs to be sorted, whether it involve colour coding or a simple “last updated” flag on the top of the page. One idea would be to group posts according to when they were published using the category function, allowing people to read the posts as a chapter, while not interfering with the date archives. Yes, I think this is a go-er.
The next issue is the traditional weblog form. If I post up my entries en mass but maintain the reverse chronological front page, this will not work well. In essence, while being written as a weblog it will not be published as a weblog. So it has to be chronological down the page with the most recent entry at the bottom.
Another thing that stops it being a tradblog is the fact that it’s not updated regularly. While the end result will look like something that had been updated regularly, it will not have been published in this manner. Since it looks like a weblog and since I have been running a weblog for three years, an explanation clearly placed on the main page will be necessary. Along side this I plan to have a mailing list subscription box so I can inform people when the next wadge of posts are up.
In conclusion, then, I’m not really running a weblog any more. Or rather, I am. The delay between it being written and read is the thing. Since I’ve steadily built up a readership over the years based on regular updates it’ll be interesting to see how this haemorrhages over the months.
When I was about seventeen, and at college on the west coast of Canada, I wrote letters home. Email wasn’t an option (I think there was one computer at the college for students’ use, but it was a glorified typewriter, really, with no connectivity – and besides, even if we’d managed to dial up, in 1991 there wasn’t really anything to connect to). So I wrote home to my mum and sister – long missives on ruled paper stolen from my class notes folder, continuing in pages ripped from diaries and the back of photos and brochures – little snippets of everyday life, bundled up periodically – rather than being written in one sitting (I wasn’t organised enough for that) – and then sent home.
Except we were 10km from the nearest post office, and I could never remember to get a stamp. So I just kept writing and writing and writing until I would eventually get around to sourcing one.
Meanwhile, seven thousand miles away, my mum was getting increasingly worried. She hadn’t heard from me in two months. She hoped everything was ok. Sporadically, she’d receive a bundle of scribbled paper – a twenty nine page missive written over six weeks or so.
I think the thing was that I was in the habit of writing to her regularly – it just wasn’t getting through, because it wasn’t being posted. But the very act of writing felt as if it should have been enough. By writing pretty much every day, I was keeping in contact, mentally.
The problem wasn’t in the regularity of writing, but in how often it was posted. I needed to remember that once I’d written it, it wasn’t yet *out there* – that required an extra step, too. And *that* was the problem. So when she complained that I wasn’t writing regularly, I was able to say “I am – you’re just not receiving it regularly”
I realise this is probably irrelevant, and doesn’t particularly contribute to your archiving/posting conundrum. But hey-ho. The web is full of useless contributions like this.
No, Meg, that’s actually quite a useful analogy. Thanks.