This blog has moved:

http://www.thebuckmans.com/Mory

In addition to my current writing, all the old posts are collected on the new page.
(You can use your browser's "find" function to find what you're interested in there.)
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This site requires Javascript.
You can see where this becomes a problem.
Without Javascript,
Many posts will look wrong
Comments are inaccessible
Interactive dialogues won't function
Hidden text will never be revealed
The sidebars will not open

If you choose to continue, be warned
That you are missing crucial elements
Of I Am Not's design.

Monday, February 22, 2010

74?

Here's the situation in a nutshell. Blogger is preventing me from putting all my posts on one page, because now they've got a limit on how long you can make a page load. This is unacceptable to me. They may fix the situation within the next few days, in which case I'll continue to post here. If they do not, I'm going back to Web 1.0, where I can control my own site again without having to learn any advanced web development. Either way, this has demonstrated to me that I cannot rely on Blogger for the future. There will be a part 3 to the blog, I promise you that, but it won't be here.

Posted @ 3:20 PM     See this post on TheBuckmans.com

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4 Comments:

Remind again why you so desperately want to make Firefox cry?

 
And we just talked about this, too...

I hope you find a good way to continue the blog properly. Any ideas yet?

I suppose you could always throw the html code onto a domain of your own, and then to make new posts you could still use blogger to generate the code.

 
Richie, there's no need to be so dramatic about it. In Firefox it took between 20 to 50 seconds to load the entire page, depending on the computer. Last week I wrote that 74 post that affected other posts (which is now inaccessible), and for a few hours after that the blog was broken and took a few minutes to load. If that's what you're basing this on, I apologize. I did mess up there. But it was only a few hours, and then I found and fixed the problem and it went back to the more reasonable load time that it was before.

Look, I don't see the problem. If you want to just see the most recent posts, they appear almost instantly. You only need to wait if you're interested in the earlier stuff, and if you're reading earlier posts chances are you've got at least a full minute to spare. The entire page all told was 3 MB; that's not huge.

But I'll answer your question straight. There is an aesthetic appeal, for me, in that everything I write here gets added to the whole page rather than taking away old things. It creates the impression that the entire blog is one cohesive document, which (as you'll see when I finish my epic) it is.

I like that someone could theoretically look at the post "Beauty of the Mundane, Banality of the Imaginary" with a vague sense that that phrasing sounds familiar, use the browser's search function (rather than Blogger's more useless one) to find the word "mundane" on the page, and be led right to the February 21 2005 post "the mundane and The Imaginary!" to see what I meant by making that reference.

I like that someone reading the second "Who am I?" might press the End key on the keyboard to find the original "Who am I?" and compare the two, to see what things I've saved and what things I've changed.

I like that someone who's curious about the ongoing themes and conflicts of the blog could move the cursor over the bold word "smile" in "Two Glasses: Tanya and Erika", see the title "GAME OVER" appear, and wondering what I meant by that find the phrase "GAME OVER" and see exactly why I'm identifying more with Tanya than with Erika.

A lot of the interconnectedness of this blog is subtle. But the fact that it's all on one page means that those subtexts are just a few keypresses away from being found by anyone. Which isn't to say that anyone will find that stuff, but the fact that anyone could is important to me. If you had to enter the phrase into the Blogger search field, and then you had to sift through dozens of entirely unrelated posts, and then might not even see the actual post being referenced because Blogger's search is really bad, then sticking in these little references all over the place would be like me telling a joke to myself. Making all the posts accessible from one page means that someone somewhere may get the joke someday.

 
Or to put it into a more conflict-focused perspective: The blog is seen as a very temporary art form. You say what you have to say today, then tomorrow you'll push it away and say something else. Because blogs can have any kind of content you can over time cover lots of different ground. But you're always dealing with it on a very shallow level, because tomorrow the old posts will go away and there will be new posts to replace them. I object to this perception of what blogs are capable of.

I think each new post should make the blog (as a whole) deeper. You can see this attitude going all the way back to the final "cadence" of Part 1, where I was referencing old posts word for word but adding in context which made those old posts richer. And you can see this attitude in how over years' time I've developed the fictional stories I've told involving Ariel and the future-people and the blog and all the others. And you'll see it in its clearest example in the post I've been working on, a post which would absolutely suffer for not being on the same page as everything else.

I think that answers your question.


Tamir: I'm thinking of putting the blog -more or less as it was a few days ago- onto www.thebuckmans.com. I mean just recreating the HTML of the main page, and sticking it on there. Whenever I want to add a new post, I'll put it into that single HTML page manually and put a link in an RSS feed (also manually). I've basically been writing in raw HTML all this time anyway, so it wouldn't be such a stretch. Then I'd either have some external commenting system for each post, or a commenting system for the entire blog. I'm leaning more toward that idea, since it's so rare that anyone ever comments.

Now, setting this up will take time, so for the time being I'm still hoping Blogger will undo this change they've made. It's not entirely outside the realm of possibility, because there are many other people than just myself complaining about the new load-time policy. However, like I said in the post even if Blogger did reverse their decision I've come to realize I can't stay here any longer than the end of part 2. So the Web 1.0 solution is where I'm probably going to end up, and it's just a matter of whether I move a week from now or a year from now.

 

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