At A Crossroads
This month I finally upgraded to a pc and an OS made in this century.
And there was much rejoicing... Yay!
So what took so long? A few reasons. First and foremost, I couldn't justify the expenditure. The pc I had was sufficient for the work I put it through: coding and writing. No games, video uploads, file sharing, or anything else that required a respectable amount of CPU or memory. I had a 4 GB hard drive and most of it was empty (My first pc had a 140 MB hard drive!). Besides, a year after upgrading someone would surely come along and make my new purchase outdated. So, why bother playing that game? If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I finally gave in for two reasons: 1) there were no new software upgrades for my OS and it was impacting my work, and 2) it was free. To paraphrase my old band, "free pc's are the best pc's there are."
But this upgrade opened up a can of worms in me noggin'. It made me realize that all of the self-denial for the past decade has turned me into a Web Dinosaur. There's so much new Web technology out there and I have no idea how it was put together. While my coding skills are still useful, I haven't kept up. As such, my skill set can easily be offshored to India or China for a third of what I used to get and by no means was I expensive. Good luck finding a job in this economy.
I've been dissatisfied with Blogger's interface for some time. And all the clunky code makes the files four times bigger than they should be. You see, kiddees, us first gen Web programmers had to keep out code tight, clean and minimal or we'd never hear the end of it from the Marketing dept. Bandwidth was a precious commodity back then. Dial up modems ruled the day. We did all our surfing at work on the company's T1 line.
To this day, I still code to Spartan standards. When I saw that even minimal posts were heavy with code, I grit my teeth. Consider it my OCD. I'd intended to bring the blog in house but there's been a steep learning curve with their XML driven style sheets. Although I finally succeeded in approximating something, it's taken me way too long and the thought of applying it to the whole blog seems like a waste of time. After all, no one's reading this except me.
That's not a cry of self-pity. It's an honest, face-the-facts analysis of the activity here. And it's all my fault.
When I first started blogging, I'd intended it to build my brand. If I could generate an audience then by the time I was published I could have a nice spike in sales coming out of the gate. Well, none of those things has happened.
I never had the time to post with anything like regularity. Daily? There wasn't time to post something weekly, or even monthly. I stretched myself too thin (time not volume). It's hard to hold someone's interest if you don't feed them regularly. Couple that with a lack of focus (My interests are all over the map: beer, politics, music, science, fiction, etc.) and people tuned out. If I spend three posts in a row talking about sci-fi and someone isn't in to it, they stop coming by.
If you're not a celebrity (even D-List members count) in the loosest definition of the word, you have to spend your time visiting everyone in the blogosphere and commenting on what they've written to get your name out there. With any luck, they'll like what you have to say and follow you back to your blog and put you on their blogroll. Again, that takes A LOT of time, something I don't have.
So Blogger announced that they were discontinuing FTP support for its users. Not a bad move on their part. Only 0.5% (1 in 200) of their users host their own blog and just use their interface to compose their blog. They're offering to port everyone over to yournamehere.blogspot.com and put pointers in place so that dedicated readers don't get lost. I considered it, but then I'd be stuck with advertising and my files in the cloud: two things I detest.
Nope. No, cloud computing for me. I don't trust it. It doesn't make me feel secure. The privacy advocate in me gets all paranoid about files disappearing or prying eyes making off with them. Some may think that makes me a Luddite but they're wrong. I like tech just fine. I just don't trust large corporations who claim to be benevolent.
So I deleted the blog from Blogger. I know. It's still here. That's because the files are on my server and backed up on my pc.
Anyway, I'm wondering what I should do now. I can make this the last post and forget about blogging until life changes and I suddenly have more time. I can start anew on a different service and just let them host it along with their kludgey code. I can keep it going here and try out the Echo comment app for $12/year. But if I'm not writing anything that compels someone to comment, why bother?
If you've got something to say, hit the "Contact" button and fill out the form (the "Comments" links are all broken now). I'll get the message. In the meantime, I'll see you around.
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DED
