Setting up this weblog has been a therapeutic experience for me. It’s been an experience that has brought many parts of my self together.
Bleeding Edge has some interesting comment on the culture and purpose of blogging. There is something real about ordinary people having a voice.
For me, I have just loved and am still loving the technical aspects of getting this working. It has involved:
- Setting up and configuring the Apache web server on my Mac
- Learning how to use the command line in Mac OS X
- Learning how to use Pico to edit files from the command line
- Modifying the Apache config file to add named virtual hosts as I have two web sites running off my server
- Installing Moveable Type from the command line
- Installing PHP and MySQL – not that I have done anything with it yet
- Learning Dreamweaver and HTML – I wrote my first line of HTML only a year ago
- Inspecting the source of web page after web page to get ideas of how to technically and aesthetically present my ideas
- and lots more…
It’s amazing how helpful people are too.
I suddenly got very tired at 6pm tonight and decided to take the rest of the night off formal work. (I often work through to midnight with a couple of breaks in there somewhere.) So I decided I would just muck around and do whatever i fancied. Well my partner went to bed to sleep so that left me with the TV, which I watched for a while, and my computer which I came back to eventually.
I really want to set up a photo album on this site so I had a look at Learning Moveable Type which reminded me that I need to install Image::Magick.
Well that took me on an expidition. I still haven’t installed it, but within five minutes of posting a question to the Image Magick discussion board I had an answer to my first problem.
When I get that solved, I’ll put up some photos. Can’t wait.
Another I want to get up which I also think will require Image::Magick will be “My Favourite Melbourne Cafes”
But then the flip side
On the other side of all that technology is the writer in me.
Blogging is an opportunity to write. I love writing. I hope I die either at my keyboard writing or at the piano playing. But over the last five years I have had writer’s block. Everything I wrote was crap. I just couldn’t get out of it. I tried sitting down and writing stuff but nothing lived. Nothing seemed to have any purpose.
Blogging has broken the spell. I don’t know if anyone is reading this but it doesn’t matter. The important thing for me is that I am writing. Having a blog means I have to write every day. I have set myself a goal of writing 200 words a day. I am mostly achieving that – apart from a few busy days where I haven’t written anything.
And the great thing is that it has spilled out into my other writing. I am editing stuff I wrote a few years ago and finally being able to find that distance I need to be able to write with insight yet remain far enough away to make it interesting for the reader.
Feel free to let me know how I am going.