Blogging Really Locally

I just installed Movable Type on my desktop Mac using this guide (there’s also one for Tiger but I won’t be getting that for a while) and while it was a, shall we say, somewhat interesting experience it has thrown up an unexpected thing. I was expecting this local installation would be most useful for designing new MT powered sites without the need to connect to a remote server and while I probably will use it for this the primary use looks to be a bit more vital.

As anyone who’s lived or worked with me knows, I’m not desperately good at filing things. My physical system tends to be a big pile of papers, maybe two piles, sorted in the order in which things were put on them. It’s more a sedimentary system requiring an archeological dig to find stuff. On my computer I tend to file stuff in the same way, throwing everything in the Documents folder and leaving it there until it gets to the stage where there’s too much stuff so I create a subfolder called “old stuff”, move everything in there and start again. Same goes for my email inbox, though thanks to filtering this isn’t really an issue. (Books and GNs do tend to be sorted, but this is more a zen thing, a hangover from the bookselling days.)

So far this system has served me well because I always know exactly where something is. It’s in the pile. Where in the pile might take a bit of time, but it’s definitely there. However, I’m now on the cusp of running my own company and in the process of doing brand new things like keeping accounts and invoicing people I feel this need to be a little more organised.

Now, what part of my life is incredibly well organised? Well, my Weblog has 1,689 and counting entries spanning five years, sorted by date and listed in numerous categories as well as being searchable and I often search through the 1,628 and counting entries posted to the Linklog to find that resource that seemed interesting at the time and is now vitally useful. The only problem is it’s been created for an outside audience. I post things that I think might be of interest to others. I also don’t post things I don’t want others to know about.

Most importantly, blogging now comes naturally to me. I’m not going to keep to a new system of recording and filing but I can blog. And so that’s what I’m doing – keeping a local blog of all the jobs I do for other people and all the tedious little things I do that are relevant to me and my business but not to you, all sorted by date, neatly categorised and fully searchable. No notebooks, no folders, no printouts, just a nice fat database with an interface I’m 100% comfortable with.

I should have done this ages ago.

[Update: I'd been toying with using the excellent Scrapbook Firefox extension to record stages in page design that would otherwise be lost and with this new blog now have the motivation to do so. It took a little wrangling (setting the data directory to within the localhost server) and it's not perfect but already I'm finding new ways to sort and file stuff. Shame I can't link to anything outside the WebServer directory.. unless someone knows a trick...]

[Another Update: Obviously static pages load quicker from your own hard drive than they do flying over the internet, but it's worth noting that pages that are dynamically generated do so significantly slower than on a hosted server. Because I couldn't get MySQL set up my pages are all static and I think I'll be keeping them that way.]