On muddling
20/07/14 05:09
It is no surprise to me that the package software for publishing personal web sites doesn’t quite fit the way I use my web site. Finding the right software to publish web sites has been a challenge for me both in my personal web site and in the church’s web site. I guess that I am simply not a typical consumer of such products. I’ve been working with the web long enough that I know a bit of html programming language and I have used my skills to customize pages and to make things look the way that I want. My goals for my personal site and for the church site are quite different.
With the church site, I have tried to keep the design simple and accessible. Ideally there would be several people who would contribute directly to the site, so we went with an Internet browser interface. All it takes is the knowledge of a single password and any user can make modifications to the site from any computer. The vision was that church volunteers could take responsibility for content in various parts of the site and make regular updates. The reality is that we haven’t identified those volunteers. We have members who know how to make those changes - there are even a couple of members who are professional web designers. And ewe have plenty of volunteers who are very generous with their time and energy. Somehow, however, the web site hasn’t become a priority for volunteer hours.
The issues with my personal web site are different. The big issue is that the site contains a huge amount of text. Most blogs are tens or hundreds of words written periodically. My blog is a thousand words a day. My site currently has over 2,500 thousand word essays. That isn’t a huge amount of data in the age of the Internet, but the way that it is organized, with entries carrying dates and links to other entries by date means that there are simply a lot of links that need to be maintained. One solution would be to have blog posts expire after a certain number of days. I’m sure that there is no one (other than me) who goes back and looks at blog posts from seven years ago.
Since 2011, I have been using software that creates monthly archives. This makes the essays easier to search if you know that date of the material for which you are looking. However, in order to make the blog posts really accessible, a system for searching by topic needs to be developed.
In a dream world, someone would take an interest in editing the blogs and we could sift and sort and publish a kind of “best of the blog” section that would be easily searchable by topic. Since it is unlikely that I will hire an archivist to manage the volume of writing, that isn’t a likely scenario.
My current hope is to put in place a new blog system sometime during this summer that will enable keyword searching and build a pathway for organizing old blogs into topic categories. But setting that all up takes time and I have some sense of design and want the appearance of the blog and the web site to be a bit more than a straightforward academic or industrial site.
So for a few days at least, I have been publishing just words to the blog without photographs. I have a lot of photographs of the past week with Vacation Bible School and other events. and I was hoping to get some of them up on the site, but my web publishing software is being quirky at the moment. Some mornings it is taking longer to get the blog posted than it does to write it, with multiple failures before a successful post. I know the reason that this isn’t working correctly, but I haven’t found the time necessary to go into the system and fix the problems. So for the moment I’m slogging on with a blog that is less than my vision.
When I work with grieving persons I speak of “muddling through.” Sometimes in life we aren’t able to get every task done and we aren’t able to cope with every decision that needs to be made and we just “muddle” for a while. It is a way of surviving. Muddling, of course isn’t a very pleasant lifestyle for the long term. It is inefficient in terms of time, energy and emotion. But sometimes that is all that one can do in the face of a crisis or a case of emotional overload.
For the next couple of weeks, I anticipate that I will be muddling in terms of the blog - getting by in a manner that is less efficient and less finished than I’d like things to be. It is important that I keep my life priorities straight. The blog is a part of my spiritual discipline. It is a way of communicating the flow of my life with a few people who read it regularly. It is a way of intro ducting myself to a larger number of people who visit my site periodically. But it isn’t my life. It isn’t my career. I write, in part, to teach myself how to write. I also write because it is my way of processing the events of my life. Regular readers of the blog will recall that I write about the process of writing from time to time, but that the topics of the blog are as varied as the experiences of my life.
But the blog isn’t my life. I would have nothing about which to write if I weren’t spending most of my time working at the church, developing new programs, administering the life of a busy and growing congregation, planning worship, working with teams of volunteers and dreaming about the future with visionary people. The blog is a mere reflection of life - not life itself. Life has to be the focus even if it means the blog struggles for a while.
I wish I were publishing a more polished and better organized blog. But this will have to do for now. A little muddling isn’t all bad.
With the church site, I have tried to keep the design simple and accessible. Ideally there would be several people who would contribute directly to the site, so we went with an Internet browser interface. All it takes is the knowledge of a single password and any user can make modifications to the site from any computer. The vision was that church volunteers could take responsibility for content in various parts of the site and make regular updates. The reality is that we haven’t identified those volunteers. We have members who know how to make those changes - there are even a couple of members who are professional web designers. And ewe have plenty of volunteers who are very generous with their time and energy. Somehow, however, the web site hasn’t become a priority for volunteer hours.
The issues with my personal web site are different. The big issue is that the site contains a huge amount of text. Most blogs are tens or hundreds of words written periodically. My blog is a thousand words a day. My site currently has over 2,500 thousand word essays. That isn’t a huge amount of data in the age of the Internet, but the way that it is organized, with entries carrying dates and links to other entries by date means that there are simply a lot of links that need to be maintained. One solution would be to have blog posts expire after a certain number of days. I’m sure that there is no one (other than me) who goes back and looks at blog posts from seven years ago.
Since 2011, I have been using software that creates monthly archives. This makes the essays easier to search if you know that date of the material for which you are looking. However, in order to make the blog posts really accessible, a system for searching by topic needs to be developed.
In a dream world, someone would take an interest in editing the blogs and we could sift and sort and publish a kind of “best of the blog” section that would be easily searchable by topic. Since it is unlikely that I will hire an archivist to manage the volume of writing, that isn’t a likely scenario.
My current hope is to put in place a new blog system sometime during this summer that will enable keyword searching and build a pathway for organizing old blogs into topic categories. But setting that all up takes time and I have some sense of design and want the appearance of the blog and the web site to be a bit more than a straightforward academic or industrial site.
So for a few days at least, I have been publishing just words to the blog without photographs. I have a lot of photographs of the past week with Vacation Bible School and other events. and I was hoping to get some of them up on the site, but my web publishing software is being quirky at the moment. Some mornings it is taking longer to get the blog posted than it does to write it, with multiple failures before a successful post. I know the reason that this isn’t working correctly, but I haven’t found the time necessary to go into the system and fix the problems. So for the moment I’m slogging on with a blog that is less than my vision.
When I work with grieving persons I speak of “muddling through.” Sometimes in life we aren’t able to get every task done and we aren’t able to cope with every decision that needs to be made and we just “muddle” for a while. It is a way of surviving. Muddling, of course isn’t a very pleasant lifestyle for the long term. It is inefficient in terms of time, energy and emotion. But sometimes that is all that one can do in the face of a crisis or a case of emotional overload.
For the next couple of weeks, I anticipate that I will be muddling in terms of the blog - getting by in a manner that is less efficient and less finished than I’d like things to be. It is important that I keep my life priorities straight. The blog is a part of my spiritual discipline. It is a way of communicating the flow of my life with a few people who read it regularly. It is a way of intro ducting myself to a larger number of people who visit my site periodically. But it isn’t my life. It isn’t my career. I write, in part, to teach myself how to write. I also write because it is my way of processing the events of my life. Regular readers of the blog will recall that I write about the process of writing from time to time, but that the topics of the blog are as varied as the experiences of my life.
But the blog isn’t my life. I would have nothing about which to write if I weren’t spending most of my time working at the church, developing new programs, administering the life of a busy and growing congregation, planning worship, working with teams of volunteers and dreaming about the future with visionary people. The blog is a mere reflection of life - not life itself. Life has to be the focus even if it means the blog struggles for a while.
I wish I were publishing a more polished and better organized blog. But this will have to do for now. A little muddling isn’t all bad.