Eccentric Flower:200906/Get This Party Started

Over the years I've gone back and forth between wanting things to be very manual and very automatic. It cycles.

Generally when I start in a new place I want to do everything by hand - in fact, often the desire to have that sort of hand-control is a motivation in switching to a new place. Later, once my patterns of usage fall in, I start thinking my GOD this takes forever and start automating. Generally that marks the spot where decay sets in.

If posting a journal entry is easy - if it's a pushbutton thing - then I post too many of them, say too much, don't edit my words enough internally; and I get myself into trouble. If I have to actually edit the links and plan ahead and do all the labor by hand, you get fewer entries, but they're entries that are less likely to make you want to burn me in effigy afterward. Or so the theory goes.

These entries are, for now, almost all manual. I add the links myself, put things on the TOC myself, lock the pages myself, and so on. That won't last. I will definitely try to make some of the fiddle work easier. But I think I really do have to try to leave myself a few bits of unpleasantness in the process. Just to keep it from being too casual an act.

One very big hurdle - one I didn't realize how hard it was going to be to get used to until I started this entry - is that MediaWiki bases its links on page titles; which means I have to come up with some sort of title before I begin the entry. This is not the way it's supposed to work. The normal mode has been to write all the rambling I do, look at it after the fact to see what splashed onto the page, and then figure out a title. Can't do that now. This may force me to structure things better, or it may mean you see a lot of randomness in the titles. Don't know yet. (I suspect the latter.)

I don't have RSS working right now because MediaWiki's RSS implementation is extremely stupid, and I need to see if there's an extension that can make it smarter. For now I will echo entry notifications to LiveJournal by hand. But since I don't see a need for RSS - never have, never will - that will be something I will refuse to do for an extended time. I'll either automate it or I'll stop doing it. [EDIT: Feed is in place. See the journal main page.]

You'll notice the format of these entries is very plain. No little icons, no sidebar, no graphics. I go back and forth on that too, as you'll see from the archives as they appear. It's nice to have some sort of mood indicator, but it's also a cop-out; it warns you, which is nice, but it frees you from having to read critically to deduce my tone, which is bad.

They may come back. I go back and forth about that too.

What's clear is that I'm 41 years old and I don't get paid for this, and I'm not moving again if I can help it. This is too much work for something that's voluntary. I may alter the format - I may add decor - I may even listen to your suggestions/gripes about the format (I always have) - but if the answer is "leave MediaWiki as a tool and go to something else," tough luck. I spent weeks debating whether this was the right choice, and did not commit to it lightly. That ship sailed after the first of several weekends where I did absolutely nothing but work on moving pages. It's too late now.

Might as well enjoy it. There'll be another entry after this one with some non-meta-content. Welcome aboard.