So. Welcome to the new Phaysis-point-oh. My nine years with Prohosting have drawn to a close, and with the change in webhost comes a change in journaling engines. After 9 years of trying, and failing, and trying, and failing, and trying again (and then failing), I have given up on building my own engine and have finally decided to take the path of least resistance. Phaysis.com is now powered by WordPress. Resistance is futile.
During the site’s downtime (you did notice it was down, didn’t you?), I took the opportunity to convert all my old journal entries from the original engine (and a long-lived hack) called “Sojournal” (clever, ain’t it?), into a format suitable for importing into WordPress. Took a week of work to build the conversion script. So after installing WordPress on my new webhost, doing some basic configuration, and selecting the temporary design theme, I imported all of my old entries.
Now everything I’ve written over the 6 years I used Sojournal are instantly accessible by tag, category, archive, permalinks, and by the nifty search box to the upper right. Amazing how handy that stuff is, considering that for years the only way to read specific entries in Sojournal was to step through the pages sequentially…aaaaall the way back to the start. I know a few of you who did that, and I apologize for never fixing that design oversite for so long.
In the future, I plan to post an import conversion how-to with code and samples. Because I’m pretty damn proud that I was able to identify the need, start the project, plan the solution, and implement the code necessary to finally, for once in my unproductive hobbyist career, finish the damned project. (I have to celebrate my victories, no matter how insignificant they are.)
The upside to using WordPress is that it’s one of the most widely-used blogging engines around, so there’s a ton of support, themes, plugins, widgets, debugging, etc. So the heavy lifting has been done for me already. And that’s intensely liberating, because after years of groveling at the text editor with no less than five journal-engine abortions — “Glyph”, “Raganotes”, “Craftix”, “Ph::Thing”, and most recently “Munde” (the names are more clever than the code) — I can move on with my life and get to posting. Which is why I started this site 9 years ago (I promise you).
The downside? Spambots. Common attack vectors. Well-published vulnerabilities. A treadmill of upgrades to fix problems. Actually, the upgrades are fine, since the pen-testing is done by the developer community instead of me. And the final downside: homogeny…that’s a tough one to overcome. Everyone has a blog; what makes mine so special?
This is my blog.
There are many like it, but this one is mine.
My blog is my best friend. It is my life.
I must author it as I must author my life.
My blog without me is useless. Without my blog, I am useless.
I must write my blog true.
I must shoot the shit straighter than my blogroll who is trying to ping me.
I must bullshit him before he tracks back. I will….
My blog and myself know that what counts in the blogosphere is not the flames we fire,
the noise of our posts, nor the threads we make.
We know it is the blog hits that count. We will hit….
My blog is human, even as I, because it is about my life.
Thus, I will learn it as an author.
I will learn its permalinks, its categories, its tags, its comments,
its pages, and its blogroll.
I will ever use it against the ravages of annoyances and indifference.
I will keep my blog clean and ready, even as I am clean and ready.
We will become part of each other. We will….
Before RSS I swear this feed.
My blog and myself are the defenders of my personality.
We are the writers of our emotions.
We are the presenters of my life.
So be it, until there are no more emos. PEACE.