aporem.net

Over a long period I’ve become frustrated about my blogging progress. I’ve confined myself first to two posts per week and then to one. Confined in order not to fall behind with posts and to keep a constant blogging rate. As seen today, it was an utter catastrophe.
I don’t have time, commitment or inspirations to have a fixed schedule. This is a private blog after all. Hence, in productive times I had too many interesting articles piled up to blog about and had problems deciding what should go in. And in times when IT news trickled in slowly, I couldn’t keep up with the self-imposed rate.

Therefore, I decided that from now on, I post at a more flexible schedule, whenever something comes up.

Again, I have to reduce the frequency of my posts.
In order to not fall even further behind, I will post from now on only once a week, i.e. the next post will be on March 6.

Either time is passing by faster than I can write or I write less frequently as time passes, but any way I put it the result is the same…

Holiday time is the time for the senseless “out-of-office” or “seasons-greetings” mails. I don’t use the automatic answering mechanism and don’t answer to bulk mails (except invitations).

Nevertheless, I want to inform you, dear audience, that I’m not going to write articles for the next two weeks.

Since writing blogs is not in the job description of my day job, I have to adjust the updating schedule.
Instead of posting every monday, wednesday and friday, I will just post on tuesdays and fridays.

Even though this has no direct impact to my site (at least I hope so), since I do no direct coverage, I felt that I’m obliged to mention changes to the point 6 of the bloging principles.

The permalinks structure is now changed to a category based link structure. This means that individual articles are now accessible via “/category/name-of-the-post/” instead of the meaningless post number.

This makes an individual post URI more readable, easier to recall and ‘hackable’, i.e. deleting the postname from the URI shows all articles in this category.
Additionally, the pages have nice names, too.

As everything this comes at a cost, namely longer link names and a complete new structure to pick up by the search engines. (Their indexing algorithms don’t like changes in the structure of a web site.)

I decided to take the first version of my homepage offline. First, I just kept it out of sentimental reasons, the same sort you keep the first own ‘hello world’ program. Second, it didn’t work anymore. It is written in PHP3 in a style that is today considered highly insecure. And finally, it had one major deficit. It lacked content. Especially own content.

It’s been nice, but now it’s time to say good bye!

In the documentation of wordpress there is a section called “Planning Session” which asks the following questions:

1. What am I going to do with this?
2. Who is going to read this?
3. What kinds of information will I be posting?
4. Why am I doing this?
5. Who am I doing this for?
6. How often am I going to be posting and adding information?

This is quite a blow to sites like mine, since there is no easy answer to any of the questions above.
So I had to come up with at least one idea of what kind of content I want to put on my site. And that’s where my passion of reading books on programming (although I rarely write code) came in.

Hence here it is: the new category called programming, where I will post my rants and opinions about the writing of code.

“Alas, a new look again!”, the sporadic passer-by might think, and yes, since the change from the self-written to a CMS-managed site this is again a major overhaul of my presence on the web.
And since wordpress is a blog-software, I feel much more obliged to post a rant once in a while.

The old site can now be found at /old/, the former old site at /old/old/.

Eventually, I’ve decided not to transfer anything else than the link collection from my old site here since it isn’t something genuinely new or unique.

One of the first things to change for a new website is to give it a unique look. Or at least to change the default theme to something less generic. Since I’m quite new to wordpress, designing a theme was not quite an option.

Luckily, the community has addressed this problem an set up a site with a bunch of themes to start tinkering with.

So this is it, the shiny new style of my page!

Welcome to my new wordpress powered site!

Although wordpress is a blog software and my websites always lacked actuality and new content, I’ve nevertheless set up my mind to give it a try.

The main motivation for this change was the simplicity of wordpress compared to other content management systems (CMS), especially for such a simple site like mine.
Other points were the lack of regular updates the pain of updating (there was no clear distinction between user supplied files and the program files) and the security concerns it regularly raised.

In the near future I want to transfer the whole content to this site, hoping no show-stoppers arise in the migration process.