The choice to make a blog

This could be a "trivial pursuit"

Finally, I've turned my attention to carving out a little place on the World Wide Web to hold a collection of my ideas intended for public consumption and written in this particular form of hypertext. "Finally" ... and perhaps unfortunately so. Now I have the time to do it, but that happenstance of the present is another story to tell later.

I can use blogspot.com as a "little place" as well as any other because at this point in time I don't have ambitious goals for how these blog posts should appear.

Because in the recent past I had the experience of being so short of funds that my independently registered and hosted domain, suede-shirt-travel.com, was discontinued, I now want to use a no-cost hosting service that I hope can be more or less "permanent" and that serves the purposes that I describe in this blog post. Maybe someday I will make another website as an experimental medium to hold another collection of my writing and perhaps other media, but not at this time.

I will practice manipulating the "presentation" features of this blogging site as I have the time. I have lots of experience in designing and formatting the content of a technical document, so I will discover whether that experience is relevant for producing a useful blog.

In Noah Purifoy Desert Museum, California

In the recent past I created and minimally operated my own website, and I did not have the time or motivation to make something more experimental or "cutting edge" out of it. My suede-shirt-travel.com site was the WWW face of a small historical tourism business in San Francisco, California. In creating that site, I learned a good bit of HTML and CSS, allowing me to code the entire website "by hand." My bias was to make a site with a straightforward layout and with user-interface elements that responded very quickly to user gestures. The straightforward layout reflected the fact that only a few kinds of content elements appeared on the site's pages.

From the outset of the deployment of the WWW as a medium, I've had significant reservations about the WWW's capabilities to define and present hypertext content. Most of those reservations have not been overcome by my experiences so far developing web pages and websites and, especially, using the websites of others. The WWW, HTML, and CSS seemed to me to be very much a "hacked together" set of capabilities (e.g., a "stateless" medium and thus inappropriate for implementing robust information-technology applications). Early on, that is, in the year 1990 plus or minus, I very consciously chose not to "dive into" learning HTML and webpage authoring tools because I believed at that time that the primitives were not a strong foundation for a significant step forward in hypertextual communication. I will probably elaborate in a future blog post on the reasoning behind my opinion.

I have no real interest in being a "serious" member of the "blogosphere." I will work with the blog form for a while and see how I feel about its strengths and weaknesses. I have seen lots of blogs created by others, and most do not interest me. That's because a primarily chronological presentation of a set of related textual content is not my preference for organizing one's thoughts. I like to drop new content items of interest to me into the "bins" (virtual containers) in which they "belong," while wanting the flexibility to make revisions to the set of bins as I go along. And bins should be nestable, to reflect a hierarchical semantic relationship among the topics represented by the bins.

I see today that lots of new end-user software for organizing pieces of mundane information use "tagging" rather than "filing." That is, the assumption seems to be that the user has no idea of the inherent organization of the content, especially understood in a semantic fashion, but rather the app should make available a user-authored set of semantics-free "tags" that the user applies to each piece of content, as if there are no fundamental identities nor relations among the items in that set of content. But to be useful to me, the tool must support a hierarchical arrangement of the tags. Etc.

I can see how a blog can work as a running tally of one's ideas, categorized and marked up in various ways, perhaps to be reorganized for future publication in more coherent forms. I don't know today how well the blog form prepares a collection of hypertext for use in different forms and organizations. Today for me, a blog seems to be more like elaborate note-taking. Or for more discursive writing it might function as closer to a traditional "journal," rather than for creating a self-complete body of text that is "built to last." But I'm only just beginning to think seriously about the blog form.

What I expect to produce in this blog

First, I want to republish some previous writing that existed either in my "Los Angeles, California, heritage travel" pages on the examiner.com website or in the discontinued suede-shirt-travel.com website.

A remnant of a longer list of my "local history" travel articles about Los Angeles, California at Examiner.com

Second, I want to produce kinds of writing that are different than my production as a technical writer, including the following:

• Proto-essays and proto-studies, which later I might develop more fully (with necessary citations) for "serious" publication
• Reminiscences about and commentary on my personal life, for my own pleasure and self-understanding, and for the benefit of my family and close friends

Third, I want to use new writing to express my understanding of two categories of topics that interest me:

• Topics about which I would like to achieve relatively quickly a robust understanding, and then put that topic aside
• Topics about which a robust understanding will require, I believe, study over a long period of time