Category: Blogging and Internet

In Part One, I recounted the rise and demise of my first blog, SFreaders.com, between 2007 and 2009. I made the first post to that blog on May 3rd, 2007, and the final post on October 29th, 2007, so I was actually only posting for a few days short of six months. The blog itself lasted for almost two years before being taken permanently offline by the collapse of the webhost, Centrica Hosting, in early 2009. So, for the last year and a half of its life, it was actually inactive, with no posts being made to it at all.

In stark contrast to SFreaders.com, I\’d set up this blog (originally titled the GrumpyOldGeek blog – it\’s had a couple of different names over the years before settling finally on its current title Tales of Time & Space back in 2012) on WordPress.com at the exact same time as SFreaders.com, but solely for the purpose of getting the API key for the self-hosted blog. Once that was done, the WordPress.com blog became pretty much irrelevant, as I was focusing on my much more powerful, more flexible SFreaders.com blog, my only real (blogging) concern at that time. So I walked off and left the WordPress.com blog without so much as making a post.

Actually, that\’s not entirely true. I did make a couple of posts to the blog, the first one on June 3rd, 2007, exactly a month after my first post to SFreaders.com, and a second six days later, on June 9th. But these posts were insubstantial, silly, lame, half-assed, basically just ANY old rubbish to get something up on this blog. Then I walked off again, and didn\’t come back to my WordPress.com blog for nearly three years.

When I did come back to blogging again, it had been almost exactly four years since my son had died, and I thought that I\’d take another crack at it. However, I was unwilling (luckily, as it turned out) to go down the self-hosted route again. But I had this old blog sitting there on WordPress.com, totally unused for almost three years. Why not make use of it? So I made one post in February 2010, two posts in March and one in April, the last three all part of the lengthy \”It\’s A Geek\’s Life\” trilogy, and certainly far more substantial and interesting efforts than the two pieces of fluff that I\’d posted back in June 2007. Certainly the fact that those three posts were far superior to the first two indicated favourable things about my improving state of mind. But I was still suffering badly from depression, and having major problems focusing and committing myself to anything. It was obvious that I was still deep in the bereavement phase (still am today, more than nine years after his death – I just handle it much better these days), and it was still too soon after the death of my son to commit myself to something like this.

So I disappeared AGAIN, this time not returning to my WordPress.com blog until more than two and a half years later, in December 2012. This time I was stronger, I was ready for it, and I was back to stay. I renamed and refocused the blog, and started posting regularly (I haven\’t missed posting at least once a month since December 2012), and effectively turned Tales of Time & Space into my main blog, despite running a number of other blogs \”on the side\”. I have one other blog on WordPress.com, three on Blogger, and my second self-hosted WordPress blog, SF Universe, which I started around the same time as I relaunched this one, back at the end of 2012.

Tales of Time & Space and SF Universe are multitopic blogs, and all posts made to one are also made to the other, essentially providing a back-up of the blog posts. The other four blogs are all single-topic blogs. I STILL don\’t trust self-hosted blogs, after what happened to SFreaders.com back in 2009, so I regard this one to be my main blog, rather than SF Universe, which I can experiment with at my leisure. That\’s quite a change from the rather dismissive way that I used to regard this blog, but I\’ve learned from my past mistakes, and I won\’t repeat them again. This blog is now my main blog because it provides security, and will always be here, even if the unthinkable happens again, and history repeats itself with my second self-hosted blog also vanishing without warning. A blog on a big platform like WordPress.com is highly unlikely to just up and disappear on me someday, the way some self-hosted blogs do, although Dreamhost, the ISP with whom I have my hosting plan, is a reputable company who have been around a few years. No more cowboy resellers for me! I\’ve learned a LOT over the past few years.

All of which now brings me back full circle, to the first paragraph of Part One, where I said that I had found all the back-up files and databases from my old SFreaders.com blog. Well, the good news is that I\’ve decided to import all of the posts from SFreaders.com, rather than leaving them to gather cobwebs on my hard drive. These posts really should see the light of day again, despite the fact that they are quite different in look and feel to the other posts on this blog – the posts to SFreaders.com during those early days tended to be short, snappy, single subject posts, often just casual throwaway observations and comments, and totally unlike the much longer, more detailed posts that I tend to make these days. It\’ll be interesting to compare them.

I\’ve already tried importing the database, but that didn\’t work – those old WordPress databases are .sql format, and incompatible with the modern .xml databases – so the only way now is to import all of the posts, one at a time (there\’s only forty-two of them), and altering the dates so they are archived with the same dates that they originally appeared on SFreaders.com (I\’ve already started on this). If this works, I might even start digging out posts from other defunct blogs that I\’ve had over the years, and import those as well. Tales of Time & Space will become the \”One Blog to Rule Them All\”. 🙂

After all these years, it\’ll be extremely gratifying to see the posts from SFreaders.com resurrected and integrated as part of Tales of Time & Space. And one thing\’s for sure – the archives for 2007 will definitely become a lot more interesting and overcrowded than they are at present. 🙂

I was rooting through the archives the other night, looking at stuff I have squirrelled away in old folders on my hard drive, and I came upon some long-forgotten, but very interesting bits \’n\’ bobs. One folder in particular stood out, a big one, with multiple sub-folders, containing all the back-up material that I\’d saved from my very first, original, self-hosted WordPress blog, SFreaders.com.

These brought back lots of memories of my initial stuttering beginnings with blogging, and as it\’s been a long time since I\’ve done any kind of personal history posts, I thought I\’d cook up a lengthy two-parter about my experiences with blogging on the WordPress platform, both on my self-hosted sites and here on WordPress.com. Here we go with Part One of Two…

Once upon a time, way back in the Jurassic era (beginning of May 2007), I started up SFreaders.com, my first blog. It was the first time I\’d ever had a proper presence online that wasn\’t merely a collection of three or four naff web pages on a free webhosting service. I\’d had a couple of those in the previous five years or so, but they never went anywhere, certainly never more than a tiny website with a handful of drab, linked pages. The lack of webspace and options on those sites didn\’t allow for very much more.

So, I decided to go looking for something a bit more serious, not that I had the slightest clue what I was supposed to be looking for or what to do with it when I found it. All I knew was that I needed something a lot more substantial, one of those paid hosting plans with all the bells and whistles. Purely by chance, during April 2006, I managed to buy a ridiculously cheap hosting plan on Ebay.co.uk, from some outfit called Centrica Hosting, who were resellers leasing server space from Heart Internet, one of the UK\’s bigger ISPs. This was to lead to the very start of my first blogging experience.

Unlike the previous free ISPs I\’d been with, which only gave you a tiny amount of webspace, to which you could ftp a few web pages and pictures, this new, paid hosting plan delivered the full range of services that these packages usually offer. To say that I was a bit overwhelmed would be a complete understatement. At that time, I only knew a smattering of basic HTML and CSS, picked up almost accidentally over several years of pottering around on the free websites. All of this new-fangled stuff about PHP, MySQL databases and dynamic webpages was total greek to me.

My initial intention had been to ignore all of that stuff altogether and just continue as before, sticking up a few static webpages and making use only of the unlimited webspace and unlimited bandwidth, which would allow the static website to expand and develop slowly, growing over a long period of time, without fear of running out of space. But I was no expert at HTML or CSS, just a competent beginner, learning as I went along, and coding all those pages by hand was pretty darned slow. It was taking me forever to get even a relatively small website together on my hard drive, to upload to the webhost\’s server.

In addition, it did seem to be an awful waste not to use at least some of the multitude of extras included in the new hosting plan. So I began exploring the options on the webhost, although I really didn\’t understand too much at first. But a bit of searching around the web and reading up of various computer magazines, and I was starting to get up to speed on things. Just by coincidence, at the very same time, I was reading an article in a computer magazine about something called \”blogging\” and something else called \”WordPress\”, which was supposed to be easy to install and maintain, and apparently a much easier and more automatic way of getting online and maintaining a site than coding by hand. This article changed everything for me.

Up until that point, I had settled firmly on starting up a static website. I was literally only minutes away from doing so when I read this article. I was actually on my webhost, looking at all the options, getting ready to start setting up the file structure and ftp the HTML pages and images to the site, when I spotted something that was pretty much what we now call \”One-Click Installs\”, or, at least, the 2007 equivalent. And one of the options was to install this WordPress thingy that I\’d just been reading about. So right out of the blue, at the very last minute, I changed my mind and decided to try this instead.

Following all the (admittedly simple) instructions, in a mere few minutes, I had a shiny new blog installed and up-and-running. This was the evening of May 3rd, 2007, and within the following half hour, I had my first post and an About page up on SFreaders.com. I was well chuffed, and totally gobsmacked at how easy it was. During the next few days, I set up a few more Pages on my blog, and I began posting frequently and regularly from that point onwards. Over the next six months, from May 2007 up until October 2007, I put up a total of forty-two posts and a bunch of pages. I had my first serious and (relatively) long-lasting online presence at last.

Why did I make the last minute switch to a blog, when I had been for so long set on having a static website? Aside from the obvious fact, of course, that I hadn\’t known anything about blogging or WordPress right up until I read that article? Well, I wanted a site up online fast and easily, and the article had convinced me that I could do just that with WordPress, which proved to be definitely true. It would\’ve taken me months to get up a decent static site, at the snail\’s pace that I was handcoding pages. Likewise, the article had convinced me that I could post content and maintain my blog much more easily than I could a static website. Again, this was (sorta) true, at least on the posting side of things. Thirdly, I wanted something a bit more interactive than a static site, so the idea of comments also attracted me, and they seemed to be a major plus, at least in theory, but didn\’t exactly work out that way in reality.

It wasn\’t all plain sailing. Firstly, my big hopes for comments and interactivity ended up a huge disappointment. Despite a half-dozen replies to posts over the six months, there was virtually zero interactivity with others on my blog. The comments thing proved to have been a complete waste of time. The blog might as well have been a static site. A secondary drawback was that I simply could not resist the obsessive urge to tinker with the appearance of my blog – the themes, the CSS, everything – and I often spent far more time tinkering than I did actually posting content. In many cases, I just could not leave well enough alone, and ended up making a mess of things on quite a few occasions. I knew just enough to be dangerous.

Thirdly, and most seriously, once I started blogging, I simply stopped learning about web design. Back when I was hand-coding web pages, I was constantly learning more about HTML and CSS, picking up something new with each new page that I coded. But I\’m essentially a lazy git, and once I started using WordPress, with the exception of occasionally fiddling with the CSS of a theme, my hand-coding experience came to a grinding halt. Why bother with all that learning code carry-on when WordPress did everything for me pretty much automatically? Seemed like a great idea at the time, but in the long run, it was extremely detrimental to my learning web design, as I\’ve advanced very little in all the years I\’ve been blogging. I often think of how far along I\’d be now if I\’d stuck with designing static webpages instead of switching to WordPress.

Overall, however, installing WordPress had proven to be a positive experience, and had kick-started my first serious, regular, online presence. As I\’ve already said, for six months I posted regularly, very regularly at first, sometimes five or six times a week. But the frequency decreased as time went on, down to once or twice a week, until, at almost forty posts, I hit a brick wall. I didn\’t make a single post for three weeks, just seemed to lose interest, run out of juice. I came back after the three week break and made three more posts and then gave up on blogging completely.

Why? Well, I think the main reason for this happening was simply bad timing. I simply should not have started a blog when I did. I could not have chosen a worse time. My teenage son had died in April 2006, slightly more than a year before I started my self-hosted blog. I really was in no fit state to run a blog or anything else at that time in my life, and it was remarkable that I was even able to get one started at all, let alone keep it running for six months. It was completely the wrong time to attempt such a venture. My mental state was very fragile indeed, and I was completely numb with grief after the death of my son. I was almost a zombie, totally at sea and basically existing day-to-day on autopilot. Everything that I did during that period was pretty much automatic, and I was in a permanent daze, as though I was seeing everything through a dense fog. I really don\’t remember very clearly much of what happened in the first year or so after my son\’s death.

But as the months went on, the nature of my grief and mental state changed. Instead of being numb and in a permanent daze, my head began to clear, and the pain flooded in. The raw grief was indescribable. The waves of severe depression began to hit me, one after another after another, and I felt as though I was drowning. My mental health crumbled, and with it my physical health also deteriorated markedly. I had stopped looking after myself, and I lost interest in pretty much everything, both offline and online, including blogging. It was a truly dark time in my life, and it was during these months that I drifted away from blogging, at first gradually, and then totally.

So I backed away from the blog, fully intending the break to be temporary, with the intention of returning to it when my mental and physical health had improved. For the next year or more, I did absolutely nothing with it, aside from coming online occasionally to check for any new comments. Then, one day early in 2009, I came online and SFreaders.com was gone, disappeared completely. The reseller that I had bought my hosting package from had gone bust (I should\’ve guessed that it was too good to be true), and taken my blog (and I dare say quite a few others) with it. All gone, disappeared, kaput, without so much as an email or any kind of prior warning.

I was gutted that my lovely blog and all that hard work had just disappeared into the aether without warning, but was fortunate that I\’d had the foresight to backup the database files and pretty much everything else on my hard drive several months before. Still, it left a thoroughly unpleasant taste in my mouth regarding self-hosted blogs, a distrust that persists to this very day.

So ended SFreaders.com, and my very first experience with blogging or running any kind of online site for a prolonged period. Next time out, my return to blogging on WordPress.com…

To Be Continued…

It\’s been a while, hasn\’t it?

My last post on this blog dates from more than two and a half years ago (June 2007). To be brutally honest, I\’d set up the account for the purely mercenary reason of obtaining an API Key for my self-hosted WordPress blog – the much missed (by me, anyway) SFreaders.com – which I\’d just installed on a newly purchased domain. That one was always going to be the main blog, a more specialized one, but I did state at that time my intention of keeping this one up and running for posts and rants of a much more general nature.

I did originally have the bright idea of having several separate blogs for my main interests, as I already had four blogs at my disposal – my self-hosted WordPress blog, this one on wordpress.com, and one each on livejournal.com and blogspot.com. However, that approach quickly proved to be a bit over-ambitious and not so great an idea in the longer term. So I made a couple of posts here, and then… nothing. I stopped using this blog altogether.

So what happened? Well, the honest truth is, I\’m more of a \”one blog person\”, not like all those other guys out there who seem to have blogs all over the place, and are making zillions of posts every day. I have enough trouble keeping one blog at a time running, without trying to juggle a whole bunch of them, and I don\’t have enough free time to post so much anyway.

Even on a single blog, I\’m not a prolific poster at the best of times, and I suffer badly from depression, going through spells when I post very little, and during which I have little interest in anything. Even during a good spell, a couple of posts per week is decent going for me. I like to make long posts, not little snippets or soundbites, and I like taking my time over two or three days to think about what I want to say. I also prefer breaks in between posting, taking a breather to marshal ideas for the next one. I also prefer to post when I feel the urge to, rather than give in to the constant pressure to churn out a lot of crap posts by the clock, just so I can boast that I\’ve made so many posts per week on my blog.

With my \”slow but steady\” approach, on a single blog, I could build up to a fairly healthy body of posts over time. But spread those posts out over a number of blogs, and it starts to look pretty lousy, resulting in several \”undernourished\” blogs rather than a single strong one. Those blogs tend to die off due to disinterest and lack of posts. I\’d rather focus on a single blog, which would receive my undivided attention, and which would be be much more likely to last the course in the long one.

So I concentrated on my main blog, and allowed this one and the others I have scattered over the \’net to lie idle. For a year and a half, things ran smoothly. Aside from a few fallow patches during which the depression kicked in (it seems to come and go in \”waves\”) and posts were very sparse, the total number of postings increased steadily over time, until it was by far my most sustained effort… ever… at maintaining an ongoing online presence. I\’m into a very wide range of topics, and the well was never going to run dry with regards to having material to post, at least during the periods when the depression didn\’t sap my will to post (or do anything in general). Things were building up, slowly but steadily, and overall I was well pleased with myself, and had great plans for the future direction of my blog.

Then disaster struck. One morning I switched on my computer, booted up Firefox, and clicked on my blog. It wasn\’t there anymore. There\’d been a couple of downtime glitches before, but I knew from the onscreen error messages that this time was different, and this wasn\’t a temporary problem. My ISP had suddenly, without any warning whatsoever, gone belly-up, taking my blog (and doubtless many, many others) with it. All that work, all those posts, a year and a half of serious effort, building that bloody blog up, with big ideas for even greater things down the line. Gone. All gone. I just sat there, staring at my monitor, totally sick to my stomach. I\’d made the fatal mistake of choosing my ISP unwisely.

The WordPress self-hosting experiment had died a sudden and painful death, and I gave up in disgust, not having the heart to start up again somewhere else (despite having saved everything from the old blog). I was so pissed off that I didn\’t even have the slightest interest in starting up from scratch again with another hosting service, so I decided to take a long time out to think about what I was going to do. Even at this present point in time, I still haven\’t really regained any enthusiasm for self-hosting a blog, and, for more than a year now, I\’ve been dithering and dithering, drifting about, undecided as to what approach I\’d take next. Did I even want to go down that same path again? What other options were there?

Well, at least the time out gave me a lot of time to reflect on the entire experience and to think about the overall positive -vs- negative aspects of self-hosting. As I see it, the \”plus\” things I liked about my self-hosted blog as opposed to the service here on wordpress.com were the sheer extra power, flexibility, and the ability to configure stuff, mainly themes, css and php code. Learn enough css and php, and you can do pretty much anything with a WordPress self-hosted blog.

The problem is, these \”plus\” things also turned out to be a liability, for me, at least. I\’m no expert – I\’m not a beginner, either, but I fall under the heading of \”knows enough to be dangerous\”. Combine that with my compulsive need to tinker, and it\’s an explosive mixture. In extreme cases this could result in a non-functioning blog – luckily enough I\’m not that stupid. But I did spend an unacceptable amount of time tinkering with css and php, messing with themes, etc, rather than actually posting. Maybe fewer options would\’ve been better for someone like me.

Another thing I found was that, yes, a self-hosted WordPress blog may be way more configurable and powerful than the more limited wordpress.com version, but it also takes a lot more work to maintain it. In general, I found that the administration of my blog, whilst not too difficult, took up a lot of my time. The constant stream of upgrades seemed to come far too quickly – it feels like you\’ve hardly installed an upgrade when there\’s another one landing down the pipe, and you have to go through the same thing all over again.

Despite the process becoming a bit more automated over time, it was still a pain, and I found a few niggling little problems each time I upgraded, which prevented my blog operating at full efficiency. It seemed that I was spending far more time on maintaining WordPress upgrades than I actually wanted to, rather than posting on my blog, which defeated the whole idea that running a blog should be easier than maintaining a static website. All in all, I\’d become royally fed up with the seemingly never-ending WordPress upgrade cycle, long before my ISP ever pulled the plug.

Sometimes I found myself yearning to go back to simpler times, doing a static website coded by hand, and giving up the whole blogging lark altogether. Looking with a clinical and dispassionate eye at the entire experience with my blog, I\’d never actually used a fraction of the capabilities of WordPress anyway, and probably never would have. It was simply too powerful and too complex. By comparison, the more limited nature of a blog on wordpress.com means that a lot of this complexity and the overall hassle with administration and upgrading is removed, whilst still seeming to keep just about enough of the power plus the familiar environment to satisfy me.

My needs are relatively simple – I\’m mainly a text-based person, a writer, so I don\’t ask for much. A handful of decent templates (I\’ve already settled on one that I like), a nice text editor (which we already have), a few nice \”dashboard\” options (ditto), and the ability to easily upload one or two pictures from time to time (ditto). That\’s about it. I have no need for lots of glitzy stuff, no excessive amounts of graphics, videos, flash, music, or any of that kind of thing. WordPress.com seems to have all the bases covered. The only thing I can foresee becoming a problem down the line is running out of hosting space. I\’m one of those weirdos who prefers to have \”unlimited\” webspace, or at least a paltry 20GB or so, \”just in case\”. Saying that I\’ve only got two or three gigabytes makes me nervous.

So I\’ve started for the first time to take very seriously the idea of having my main online presence here, on my long-abandoned wordpress.com blog, something I\’d never really considered doing before. I\’ve fallen badly out of the habit of blogging and posting in general, and grown very, very stale over the past year or so. It\’s so easy to turn into a lazy sod, but much harder to kick-start oneself again after a prolonged period away from blogging. Maybe concentrating on this blog, rather than going back down the more complex self-hosted route, will prove to be a more successful tactic for getting me back into regular posting again.

Despite some prolonged periods without regular posts, I was (in general) on a roll with my old blog before it disappeared, and I\’d really like to get back on that roll again. Whether or not I\’ll stay the pace, or fade away as I have so many times before, I dunno. But I\’ll never know unless I try. But the signs are good. Over the past few months, I\’ve been starting to get back the old urge to start posting again – I\’ve got lots of stuff to post about, and a need to get it \”out there\”.

Things might just be about to get a bit more interesting around here.