Shao Kelake launch

I recently launched Shao Kelake (小克拉克), a sort of mini-version of this blog which is also used in my sidebar on the right (Shao (小) is small in Chinese).
When I started a weblog, or whatever the term was then, I primarily posted short off the cuff remarks and links to the things I found interesting. Sort of a pre-Kottke or post suck. No titles and everything was organized by date. I posted regularly and it was for a time a fun and popular project. Later I thought I was getting serious or was simply getting caught up in a trend or was simply conforming to the tool of choice at that time. The trend was for longer entries organised by title. But sometimes I don’t like such serious codification nor do I always have time nor the inclination to write. So many weblogs have become article generators and unlike some not many have much to say.
This entry for example. I seem to be just babbling on about something to fill up the required space when the first sentence would with a little thinking on the visitors part have been enough.
Shao Kelake


Back at it

As I started to write this for some reason the Creek Nickel song (not to be confused with the band Nickel Creek) “Back in the Saddle Again” (.wmv) keeps repeating itself over and over again in my head. On top of that I have a bad headache today – which came first the song or the headache?
I’ve redesigned my weblog, yet again, for about the .. well I’d give it a number, but at this point, I’ve lost track of how many times I redesigned this site. No actually about 5 times. Every year, which is still too much. Primarily this redesign has meant I have time to write my thoughts here again and fine tuning what gets displayed and how.
Much has happened this past summer, including a trip to Charlottetown, diverting my attention away from the pleasures of babbling about the things that interest me. The time I did have I tended to devote to changing 35togo, my photo weblog, and a couple “money” projects.
In most of design for the screen I try to “keep it simple with personality” . Doing so in this redesign seemed far more difficult than I had hoped primarily because my cms tool of choice has become excessively difficult to use. I have this tendency to want to upgrade software and software publishers have a tendency to release features that make you think you need to upgrade. In the case of Moveabletype – never again. One thing positive came out of this, I want to be a programmer. The time I spent upgrading mt, troubleshooting, and developing templates could have been far better spent rolling my own simple system. That is if I had the skill. Perhaps I am naive in thinking it possible but I would rather devote my “mindshare” to my own product than someone else’s.
This time, in addition to spending an inordinate amount of time on the system, I focused on simplifying the site structure and updating the archives. I’ve neglected my archives in the past but after collecting 4 years worth of entries it’s worth spending some effort. My inspiration is certainly Peter Rukavina’s weblog – he has the best weblog archive I have seen. Many of us tend to forget that there are a whole sea of visitors who never see your front page or that some people might actually be interested enough in what you say to actually navigate through your site. Peter raises the bar.
I still have allot to finish and will write more about some of the difficulties I faced later.
Edit:
The comment system is broken – nothing gets through. Moveabletype won’t let me install a new system comment template to fix part of the problem. Lovely.