Following a fairly nasty drive failure on this server I had much rebuilding to do. Now Laura has kept a blog for a few years now; starting with hand-editing pages and progressing to a nice little PHP weblog app. However bloggin has eveolved over this time too. Comments and Trackbacks and kinds of other goodies have arrived and Laura's old blog didn't have those features. Since her old blog got taken out with the aforementioned HDD-Death she pondered that it was time to migrate to a bigger and better platform.
Knowing people like Aquarion who know many things about blogging meant she had heard many of the pros and cons of various systems, and after a little research of her own she made her choice. Because of all the fun features she politely requested I install a few libraries etc. and for some strange reason I agreed.
Of course none of this actually explains why I've since started this little sideline. There are a few reasons I guess and hopefully I shall explain at least some of my thinking now.
Firtsly I call this an experiment because I'm curious about whether or not I can even blog. My life isn't exactly exciting so I can't expect that to keep me going; I guess therefore this will end up more of those blogs where I get a little soapbox and share my thoughts with the world. It'scertainly something I wanted to do more of on my main site but to be honest motivation isn't one of my strong points. It's not as if it would be hard, that part of the site is an include, the odd function and content. If anything it's actually easier than blogging. If I so desired I could very easily set myself up a little DB backend to make a new page all about content, but still I seem to find the whole concept too much like hard work. So I guess my main objective is to see if I am capable of updating this thing vaguely frequently.
Secondly I'm thinking about my writing skills. Even with a vivid imagination and a broad definition I've never manged to break beyond competent at writing, and even that's been a hard target sometimes. Now I'd say I lost a great deal of my writing ability after leaving school, and although greater social intreraction online has meant my abilities have started to improve again I feel they are still below my capabilites back then. Hopefully writing more stuff will actually help me surpass those days until I can indeed hold my head high and proclaim that I am capable! I'm not trying to become a writer or anything, I'm just frustrated at myself for letting the skills decline.
Thirdly blogging is so much part of life online these days. Everyone has their blog; huge debates rage across them and everyone links to everyone else. Whilst I have a number of objections about blogs in general I do enjoy reading some of them, and therefore I'd be interested to see if I could enjoy being on this side of one. If the experiment reveals I'm not a blogger then so be it, I shall quietly slink back away and try to put more effort into the static content of this site, but I'm getting curious enough to want to find out.
And finally! I guess what finally pushed me to try this was Laura. Having installed a few things for her I realised that I had everything I needed. In the past when I've contemtplated the idea I've always kind of thought I would do it properly and roll my own. A simple blog isn't a vast amount of code after all; it's all the extras that require time and effort.
Oh well, we'll see how this goes I guess.