It’s called thegreatsunra.com.
From 2001 to 2006 I maintained a weblog on a fairly regular basis. In those early years it was new and exciting to be “publishing” to the “internet” to “people” who may or may not be there; who you may or may not even know.
I started losing steam in 2005. My online publishing became downright anemic by 2006. For the last four years, my online identity has been wildly fragmented, publishing across the Twitters and Flickrs and Facebooks (for a spell) and Vimeos and Brainside Outs and Daneomatics and Tumblrs and even some super-secret projects that you don’t even know about, which I started and ended quietly in an attempt to rekindle that original flame.
For four years I feel I have expended far more energy trying to pull these disparate identities together into some cohesive whole, than I have actually contributing to the ether. You know, writing. Or publishing. Or making. The whole reason I started down this path in the first place. The technology was never meant to be an end, the packaging never the focus, but merely the mechanism by which I communicate with the world, externally processing my thoughts while simultaneously getting them out there in the world.
As such, I’m trying something new. Perhaps this too will fail, but I prefer to let time be the judge of that.
In 2001 my original website, by the ostentatious name of “Cromlech”, was built in Adobe GoLive. Then, it was built in Dreamweaver. Then in Notepad for a spell. Then Greymatter, if any of you whipper-snappers remember that (I’m pretty sure Zosia Blue does).
Greymatter was instrumental to supporting my blogging efforts during the summer of 2002, when I worked at Camp Ihduhapi. It was the first time I could update my website from any computer whatsoever, without needing to FTP into the server.
It was also the reason I learned HTML.
Cromlech became “Dane’s Bored” which became “Brainside Out” which I eventually migrated to Movable Type. Upon Movable Type it remained until 2006, when I launched Daneomatic on WordPress. The weblog portion of Brainside Out, complete with archives from 2001 to 2006, is still available on the internet at siskiwit.brainsideout.com, where it remains in stasis.
And so, I wish to introduce thegreatsunra.com, a Tumblr blog which may (or may not) support my contributions to the intertubes. This space is getting hella-crowded and writing for the web isn’t nearly as much fun as it was once before, but I do still have “ideas” that I need to get “out” so that I can continue having “more” ideas.
So, for the five of you who read this, you now have another place you need to check in order to keep tabs on me. And for that, I apologize. I fully realize it’s poor user experience, and I can only hope it is forgivable.
2 Comments
Why Tumblr? I’ve seen a lot of people lately transferring over from WordPress and I’m wondering if it would be better for the sort of thing I’m wanting to blog… Thoughts longer than a tweet, but shorter than the sort of reviews I used to do in grad school?
Excellent question, with an answer grounded in two parts: irrationality and friction.
The first, irrationality. There is no particularly compelling argument for using Tumblr. Its uptime is dreadful, its comment system is alienating, and it further splinters an online identity that is already unbearably difficult to track.
Despite all this, I find myself inexplicably drawn to Tumblr, because it seems to offer a frictionless conduit between myself and my contributions to the internet. The Media Library in WordPress is pretty dang good for open source, but it’s just a pain in the ass enough that I find myself fiddling with knobs every time I upload a photo. It auto-generates HTML I don’t like, it generates photo sizes I don’t like, it hyperlinks to things I don’t want to link to…
…Tumblr, for good or for bad, handles all that. I hit “Photo” and “Upload”. Done. I can embed content and begin commenting on it.
Ultimately, WordPress gives me far too many knobs to fiddle with, such that knob-fiddling becomes the end, rather than the means. I find myself getting crushed by a million tiny decisions. Should I upload the photo to WordPress, or upload it to Flickr and link to it? What about the title, or the tags, or the category, or wait, I’m not entirely happy with my custom template so I should probably fix that, and statistics statistics statistics and there are probably more plugins I should install so I can be a “real” blogger…
I am prone to unpacking things, I am wont to explore, and with the unfettered control that my own WordPress install offers, I am given just enough rope to hang myself with. I succumb to Tumblr not because it is a superior blogging system, but because it gets the frack out of my way and runs interference on my least favorite personal tendencies. I want this to be a generative tool first, a communicative tool second, but above all a tool. Tumblr seems well-suited for sharing ideas, posting content, and commenting on things, in a lightweight manner that avoids the onerous cognitive overhead that WordPress tends to burden me with.
Agreed. Thoughts longer than a tweet, but shorter than a precis.
Also, yes. The irony of the awful user experience I am creating for my readers by fracturing myself across the internet is not lost on me. I would truly like to fix this. But I have been trying to fix this for four years, and as a result have not been nearly as prolific as I was before all these “helpful” blogging platforms came along. I figure there is no harm in embracing that keen productivity once again, so long as the productivity can lead to something enlightening.
Or, swearing and poop jokes.