The Silver Lining

So despite a few emails that piss me off regarding my opinion on Diary-X, I am in the process of making things better for myself. And I've found that stereotypical "silver lining" to the disaster cloud.

And believe me-- despite a few inklings on comments sections, I've been keeping my opinion on the matter VERY much to myself. Yes, I read the LJ forum that's now front and center for DX'ers. I can say for certain that my eyes have a full range of motion to the amount of completely sappy, over-the-top "Stephen love" going on there. But yeah, my comments have been restrained. For lack of a better reason, I'm well aware of the elitist DX-only crew out there, and just don't want to deal with a lot of the crap. I don't get all of the love. I really don't. But then again, since I'm One Of Those Who Left, my opinion is a dark cloud on the fluffy rainbows of DX-dom.

Anyway... onto the good stuff. My discovery of the Silver Lining came out of this frustration. I've had three issues that I've been thinking about for a while with my current journal. I want to improve it. I want to better organize it. The layout annoys the crap out of me. So I did the traditional pros/cons list.

There are three things that I really don't like about Blogger.

1) The layout coding, I'll deal with slowly. This issue is just as equally my lack of time to commit to it than the actual coding setup. I understand somewhat how the Blogging coding works. I've messed around with new templates. For the most part, I can make them work. But it definitely goes much slower than I've dealt with in the past.

2) The Archive System If there is ONE thing I miss about being at DX, it is the split archive system that was there. it was clean-looking and well-organized. I don't like how Blogger has things done-- especially that the archive listing on the right is in opposite order (with no ability to alter it) than it makes sense to appear. I *would* want the most recent months first. Sorry, no can do. This issue could be fixed, again, by some elbow grease time on my part. Recreating a split archive by hand isn't really that much of an issue. It just takes time.

3) Tags (or categories, depending on where you're using them). Since having them on LJ, I've come to love them. They really are quite handy when archiving and organizing. I read my old entries quite a bit-- and finding them by topic is wonderful. Unless there's something I'm missing, I just don't see this feature at all at Blogger.


When I started really thinking about making the "plunge" to a blog on my own named webspace, I downloaded several different programs. Greymatter, Moveable Type, WordPress. I've used Diaryland (which has the same uptime/downtime issues as DX) and LiveJournal.

I couldn't figure out Greymatter and MT and how to get them installed. The instructions made me very nervous. WordPress, on the other hand, I got up and running. It works okay, but again.. the template thing drives me a little nutso. I found a basic one (ironically, the same one that Linda (aka Hooligan from dx days) currently uses... based on what I saw while doing some surfing a few weeks back), and it works.

I had to remind myself-- this will be for my ARCHIVES. I don't need to keep everything in blogger forever. Eventually, I probably will transition entirely to WordPress. But for now, the most important thing for me are the following:

1) An archive of all of my journal entries on MY webspace

2) The ability to tag past entries so they can be found by topic (let's face it... I do write a lot of boring, daily entries that don't matter in the long run. They just keep me writing. They can be skipped if things are sorted by topic).

3) An archive that's in the right order-- most recent months FIRST.

Yesterday, I took my WordPress experiment on my site and started doing the old fashioned "cut and paste" method to add my old entries to my site. March-April 2001 is now done. I'll work May-July 2001 this weekend, and slowly just go through everything. Tag each entry, clean up the exterior links in them (since so many no longer work or had DX shortcuts).

It'll go slowly, but surely. It's not perfect, but it will be better. And right now, that's what I'm looking for.