Eccentric Flower:199909/I was there first

This is the second entry dated today, but the previous entry was actually for yesterday; I posted it after midnight.

I am feeling rather more human today, which is probably a result of the fact that I dosed myself with Nyquil last night so I could sleep soundly. I don't know why that stuff's so effective - it doesn't have that much alcohol in it - but it is.

I saw a woman on the subway this morning. Let's see. She was wearing a sweater with a U.S. Open 2000 shirt on it - 100-year anniversary, you know; a plastic passholder on a cord around her neck, both the passholder and the cord had insignia from the 1999 U.S. Open; and in the passholder she had a grounds pass for the Ryder Cup, which is where she and her husband were obviously going.

I don't dislike golf per se, but I took an instant dislike to this woman. Not just because she was a golf fan, either. I'm not sure what it was exactly that I reacted to.

I know that the amount of money changing hands in conjunction with this Ryder Cup thing is obscene - a tourney by and for the rich. That sort of stuff annoys me on principle. But then, golf was never a sport of the plebians, unfortunately.

I hate it when I have an idea before anyone else does, and I either don't promote it or get a lackluster response to it, and then later someone comes along and makes a better go of the same idea.

I see all these message board programs like Greenspun's and I think, you know, the Mouth program has been doing this on mouth organ for ages. It's idiosyncratic, but that's because it was tailored specifically to that purpose. I could very easily have made it a more generalized one. But I didn't see a niche for it.

I see these make-your-own-weblog programs, where you can post entries at will, and I think, you know, the Colette system has been doing this for journal entries for quite a while now. (Sfoglio, which I use to post this, is a souped-up version of Colette. The three journallers I host on impudence.com all use Colette.)

I mean, I see the advantages of not having to FTP or edit HTML every time you post a new entry. You just type it into a form and the pixie does all the work, all the previous and next links, all the formatting for you.

Now ... since I have been explaining on journal-l why I do not publicize my web sites ... I should point out that this is not just a case where I put something out and expected people to find it by themselves, like Nibelung or Allegory or some of my other projects. (If you go to Allegory, please bear in mind that it's not finished; some pages are missing. It's still an experiment in progress.)

When Colette was stable, I asked various lists and people in the escribitionist community if they'd like to use it. Some of these people were dying to get away from Geocities and other horrid free providers, so I figured I'd get a few takers. Not a one. The three journallers I host are the only three people who have ever been interested.

It's true that Colette has a few "usability problems," as we say in the trade. Changing the templates (i.e. how the rest of the page that surrounds each entry will look) is a time-consuming process, where the user edits the file by hand and then mails it to me, since users can't FTP directly to their journal areas. You can't delete or edit entries once they've been posted; you have to mail me, and I go fix them (which I have always done gladly).

But the thing is, I could have fixed those. I never really had an impulse to do so. With only three users, it doesn't matter. With higher demand comes a more robust system - witness Nibelung, which has been modified several times since its inception to meet user needs, and is even spiffier than when it started.

There's also the question of money. I pay for these sites. Sooner or later the traffic gets high enough that I hemorrhage money. There is little or no way to defray the costs for a system like Colette. I don't want ads on my journal pages, do you? That's one of the reasons to escape Geocities in the first place. (Pay a fee for the service? On the web that's a good way to ensure no one will use it.)

Nibelung may have ads eventually; I warn users in the policy statement that it could happen. When mouth organ reaches critical mass - since we have a strict no-ads policy there - I don't know what will happen. Maybe I'll stop the whole thing. Maybe I'll try to get some other site, like Scarlet Letters, to host us.

It depresses me, but I don't worry about it much. mouthorgan.com gets the same amount of traffic as [old domain] - about 12,000 hits or 85 MB of data transferred per week. It's only when that number goes up past 100 MB that I get nervous - but both sites have stabilized at those numbers for many months now.

This is all geeky stuff you don't want to hear, right? Well, getting back to the point: sdn told me about this site today.

I would like to say that I wish them every success, but I'm just not that good a person. What I actually wish is that they will fail miserably and sink into obscurity.

Sorry. But at least I'm being honest about it.

Wednesday was a girl day; despite my being so ill in the morning (see previous entry) I took great pains with my appearance. Had I keeled over in the street, I'd have made a beautiful corpse.

Today is a girl day too. I haven't shaved, but any day when I change what I'm wearing three times because I'm ever-so-slightly dissatisfied with each combination is obviously a girl day.