Asleep at the blog?

I've not been particularly active on this site (to say the least) over the past five or six months. The time has come to decide whether I am going to keep going. What are the benefits?

Me and my tomato. Photo courtesy of Dan Schick.

I write a lot of online and offline material these days but for a while this blog/news posting was the focal point of that work. Lately, however, I have trailed off so that the last post was in May, 2007. What gives?

One problem is distraction: I have a number of other projects on the go and writing for the news/blog took a back seat to that. The Association of Internet Researchers conference, for one, absorbed an enormous amount of my time. The very fact that I am writing THIS post, two weeks after the AoIR conference, illustrates the issue, I think.

Another problem is displacement: The Facebook, in particular, has taken up some of my 'note writing' activities. Another has been traditional media, believe it or not. Over the last six months I have done more traditional media than ever before, and writing in the blog seems pale when compared to the Globe and Mail or GlobalTV. Although I should say that in the past an interview was often a provocation or inspiration for a blog post and I hope that it continues to be.

A third problem is direction: part way through the summer I started building an entirely new home page for myself, constructed out of "whole cloth" (HTML and CSS, edited in a text editor and uploaded via FTP). I know, it is very "old school" of me, but I wanted more control of my "look" and Plone - while wonderful in many ways - is beyond me when it comes to manipulating the interface to a significant degree. You can see the results of this revision here: http://www.sfu.ca/~smith. The revised site, I should note, was achieved only by shameless copying of others' designs, and especially the design provided by the SFU Library.

I can already see that writing a posting like this for my personal web site would be tricky and/or tedious if I wanted the full range of modern web options. In particular, the RSS Feed that comes for free with a Plone installation, might be near impossible to do by hand (although there are people, I know, who "hand carve" their RSS feed...). So perhaps I will return to Plone in the future. If/when I do, however, I think it will be as a supplement to my official page for the University. Unless I can find someone who can convert the plone.css to the sfu.css file...