After an eight-year run, it’s time for a reboot. I’m moving the blog from away from Movable Type to WordPress and off my old hosting provider to to one that’s both cheaper and less of a cock up as far as configuration goes.
It should be noted that the cock-up part was purely my doing. I had overheard system administrators at some point talk about installing software from source code. “Use the source!” they would say as sysadmins tend to be geeky enough to say such things. I apparently never got the memo that in the world of RPMs and apt-get install, nobody does that shit anymore.
Nobody but me, that is. I went tearing headlong into the installations, not really knowing what I was doing, and predictably ran into issues. If there was a library missing, I would download it to some directory chosen on whim and then manually edit the makefile. I have no idea how I got it to work, but I did and I shall never go down that path again as long as I live.
That was the third and surprisingly most stable home of the blog. Prior to that, it was hosted in a friend’s basement on a server that suffered a major disk crash. And before that, it lived on the server rack where this same friend used to work.
It was here in 2006 that I decided to get rid of the cobweb-festooned Poison Spur that had not seen an update in five years and turn it into a blog.
I even had a gimmick in mind. I was going to be a sort of Joe Bob Briggs of book reviewers, writing up critiques of sleazy old pulp novels from circa 1960 with titles like Sin Chump and pages filled with fistfights and sexual conquests. If more of the books had been even slightly enjoyable to read, I might have stayed with that.
Instead, I decided to turn my attention to my own stunted fantasy world. I would either post works of short fiction or blog about life but embellished where I saw fit. As it turned out, I saw fit plenty.
After a while, it came to me that I wanted to publish ebooks of my work and maybe make a buck or two. For this to happen, the site would need both a makeover and a purpose.
The makeover part is as done as it can be for now. The default WordPress theme has a good look for my purposes and see how pretty that photo of the Bay Bridge is? I took that myself last March. I could never make a site look that good using Movable Type. I’m sure it’s possible, but with the free version discontinued in 2013 and now having a $595 price tag for a single-user license, I don’t see giving myself the chance to learn.
As for the purpose, that will become a reality once I have finished work to pimp. Posts made sticky will create featured content with gushing self-praise and a link to amazon or wherever I decide to sell the thing.
The regular postings will be more freeform though probably not a vehicle to showcase my on-the-fly fiction efforts the way they have been in the past.
But what about the last 200+ blog entries posted between 2006 and about a month ago? My short, glib answer is that with every great revolution comes a great purge. The reality is that a lot of what I’ve posted in the past has potential but needs revising. Some of it will grace the pages of a future ebook alongside some stories I’ve never posted anywhere. What doesn’t make the cut will either be discarded or donated to a homeless shelter. I haven’t decided.
So farewell Platypus 2.0. The blog is dead. Long live the blog.