This entry was posted on Monday, May 10th, 2004 at 9:45 PM and is filed under Running a website.

Richard moved to MovableType while Kate moved away from it for a variety of reasons.

If I had to summarize the key points it is that the “build the page offline so that it can be served really fast” idea doesn’t seem to scale well. It works fine if the template doesn’t change. But change the template when you’ve got a huge number of files and boom it takes a long time.

I mentioned earlier that I plan to start another blog, one probably with more multimedia elements, an idea which Richard liked and briefly alludes to possibly doing himself.

So here’s my real dilemma - I’d kind of like to keep all my multimedia content in the same place, so I can fiscally optimize - get great per megabyte savings - but this usually means with a hosting company that doesn’t support dynamic content all that well. The solution to that is the “generate the content offline” solution - something that the blogging tool ( iBlog ) that I use for my other blog does. But there’s something annoying about that tool that just wouldn’t suit me for what I want my multimedia content to be - I want it to be as poor in meta-data as possible - I want to be able to have posts that have just the multimedia content and no titles, categories, or anything. Like I said, it is to be the incoherent blog - my other blogs will be for when I want to shape something coherent together.

So I’m thinking of writing my own blogging tool. I’ll probably reuse the templating engine that I use in BlogRollUpdater and thus this will also allow for closer/tighter integration with iLife and such. Honestly I expect the photo elements to just be ripped from iPhoto and the sounds to probably just be the MP3s from a special category in iTunes and such.

I mean, I intend to allow people to comment/ TrackBack /whatever the entries, but they wouldn’t make sense to have an RSS feed for even - they won’t even have titles. Heck, even the titles on my other blog are pretty meaningless - I just cook them up because I need something because the blogging tool says I need something. So sure, I could auto-generate titles with the timestamp or something, but that isn’t exactly going to be “meaningful” and since people will need to click to access the content anyway (I certainly can’t put the multimedia element within the feed, so since it will be loaded separately anyway, clicking to access a browser page to have it loaded within doesn’t seem like it is unreasonable), I’m wondering why to even bother having an RSS feed. Since this is going to be the “anti-blog” - the place where I put content that maybe I refer to later on, but maybe not - but for which the idea of a target audience will/must be thrown to the wind - because the premise is not that it be multi-media per se, but that it be a space where I allow myself to be incoherent - and thus perhaps display my sloppy handwriting and whatnot. So should I even bother with an RSS feed?

That’s another thing: RSS feeds for sites that do offline content construction - sometimes when the content is uploaded, there’s so much of it that a reader thinks “oh my goodness - all that at once - I’m inundated”. So, to that end, I was thinking that perhaps I should implement “rationing” - not on the as-of-yet-not-created-blog but on the content of that one, and it’s display on this one - in the sidebar have a moderately recent entry, and when there’s a slew of new posts to that one, only gradually (something to be determined over time) advance to the next post to determine what should be in there on the sidebar of this one.

That’s another thing: my sidebar - I’m thinking of making some parts of it not collapsed by default - but I’m not sure which ones or what. I know some of it needs a cleanup. I may toss it again.

While I’m at it: I’m getting most of my traffic as feeds now, and too many at that. I’m thinking crawlers are grabbing all my feeds, even when redundant - and I’m not liking that. So I’m thinking I should get rid of certain feed formats. So, if you really want a certain version of RSS to stay, or something like that, let me know - otherwise I’m going to start replacing some of those files with a relatively static “feed” that just has one entry that says “see the other feed found at _”.

But anyway, back to the rationing thing - this is really just a hack around the fact that when things are deployed offline, they cannot be updated in real time. You see, what I really want is something like the Nokia Lifeblog but I don’t presently have the infrastructure for that. I might be able to use Audlink to that end, but then that prevents me from using the “generate content offline” scenario. Also, I’ll have to test and see what size such files wind up being and whether or not I want to do that or instead an inherently offline solution like a voice recorder. We’ll see.

Online/offline - realtime/all-at-once - speed/size. Tradeoffs. Eh.

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