Too Hard to Pronounce

Zen Blogging.

September 20th, 2008

Blogging is one of those classic activities where the tools can overshadow the artform. Being someone who enjoys programming for the web, I’ve fallen prey to this myself, jumping from Blogger to Typo to Tumblr to Mephisto to Feather, all the while having fun playing with all of the fancy plugins these blogging engines have to offer. Had I spent as much time writing as I spent fooling around with blogging platforms, I’d have written 2-3 times as much material.

Over the past year I haven’t written much, but I’ve slowly come to some conclusions about how I want my blogging hosted. For me, the key things are that:

• I want nearly complete control over the platform.
  While I don’t want to constantly fuss over the technical details of the blog, I do want the peace of mind of being able to quickly customize it however I like using a language I like. Otherwise, let’s be honest, I would have just stayed on Blogger.

• I don’t want the blog to go down . . . ever.
  By “ever,” I really mean that I want the blog to be at least as reliable as my web server. While experimenting with various blogging systems, it became really obnoxious to have to deal with memory consumption on the server or worry about bugs in the platform crashing my blog. I mean, it’s a blog for God’s sake. The idea of something that is fundamentally a collection of static webpages “crashing” made me long for the good ol’ days of the 90’s where no one blogged — they just wrote stuff and posted it on the Internet.

• Dealing with trolls and spam is a waste of my time.
  I like having real people comment on my blog, but I am tired of the Viagra spammers, racists, and run-of-the-mill trolls who started circling the wagons trying to get their garbage into my comments.

• Writing and publishing should be easy.
  When I’m in the mood to write, I just want to write, preferably in TextMate or another desktop program that allows me to reliably save my work.

Around the same time these ideas were kicking around my head, I read Zed Shaw’s post on how he kept his blog up in the face of being Slashdotted, Techcrunched, Reddited, etc. His solution was one so simple that I was a bit embarrassed not to have thought of it: his “blog” is served as static content, it’s not a continuously running server process.

This is accomplished by using a website generation tool — Webgen, in Zed’s case — to process the articles together with a set of templates into a static website. I found the idea very interesting and put it on my “to play with” list, but my enthusiasm was dampened by the lack of dynamic features. In particular, how would people comment on my articles?

So, I forgot about the technique. Fast forward to this year, third party blog commenting systems like Disqus and Intense Debate were being launched from every which way. Ironically (and embarrassingly), I dismissed systems like these pretty quickly as being mostly pointless.

Things finally clicked for me a few weeks ago when Bryan Liles (of TATFT fame) let the world know that he was switching over to Webby for his blogging needs. After reading @bryanl’s post, I revisited the website generation technique and, with third party commenting systems becoming more popular, decided to jump in with both feet.

I’ve been very happy with the new Webby + Disqus setup thus far. To be sure, I’m still tweaking the blog’s format and typography, but for once I feel a real zen-like sense of satisfaction with the blog. Not only will it grow with me as my tastes change, but the blog does just enough. And just enough is just what I was looking for.