OK, another web publishing platform. Only this one seems to offer a more comprehensive tool set over that offered by WordPress. This is bad, and good. WordPress does one thing–blog publishing–and does it well. Joomla promises to be a complete content management system. Like a dustpan into which I can collect all the flotsam and jetsam from around my site and …throw it away? Preferably not, but to erect it all into a charming and inviting structure. This presents several of those broad questions which are so massive in their scope that they are easily (and often) ignored.<\/p>\n
* What am I trying to do?
\n * Why am I trying to do it?
\n * How will I do it?<\/p>\n
What am I trying to do? Well, I guess I want to present my writing, most of it old journal writing in the form of archives. And to create an attractive (to me) method to encourage me to produce new writing more often. And in both cases–the journal archives first, then the new writing later–to have it all presented in a cogent, consistent, easily navigable site. <\/p>\n
So, why do this? Apart from my fascination with the ‘how’ of it all (that comes later), I can only come up with reasons why NOT to do this at all. Let’s face it, we all have secrets, or things we maintain as secrets even though they may in fact be known to many others. Maybe they are not published facts, but certainly they are not secret as in ‘known only to me.’ Suffice it to say that truth-telling can get to be very messy and very unpleasant. And that (truth-telling) rings some bells from long ago, from when I first felt the urge to write, publicly. <\/p>\n
Back then I chose to use essentially my real name as my ID in all things Internet. My motivation was linked rather obscurely with my reasons for having always avoided television. Something feels similar between them. Checking out of reality, and inviting others to brainwash me (which is TV), seems related to checking out of my identity, and inviting you to think I am someone else. Intuitively, both felt like traps.<\/p>\n
The diversion of television and the subversion of identity are both ways of hiding. I think that is where originated my desire to do truth-telling, to write candidly about my feelings, about my relationship to the world, and to combat my very powerful urge to hide. This truth-telling ended up as writing on the internet because the Internet for me is the primary alternative to television, and because the Internet is massively lingua-scopic–it sucks up content in the form of words like the dry desert absorbs water. While the Internet absorbs much more non-text content now, I believe the Internet began as primarily test-based, and in 1999 text (along with a few pictures) is what I provided, and it is still what I am most comfortable producing. So that skims the ‘why’ of my website. <\/p>\n
Trying to answer the question of how threatens to take me into an unending labyrinth of possibilities from which I might never extricate myself. Indeed, I have spent most of my time since the beginning of my website lost in these possibilities, trying one set of tools, then switching to another, and another, tweaking and customizing inconsistently all along the way. And that process is precisely what led me to try Joomla. Which in turn, led me back to ask the original questions which have lain unanswered at the entrance to the labyrinth. What? Why? and, How? <\/p>\n
One of the answers to ‘how?’ must provide a pleasing way of integrating WordPress into Joomla. I rather like WordPress, and while I am not averse to junking it entirely for something better (or something just more fun and interesting), I have just recently succeeded–after many months of trying–in upgrading to its latest version. While that experience alone might compel some to abandon WordPress, I should confess here that that torturous process was not all WP’s fault. I frankly gave up after a while. Yes, their upgrade process was not as polished a year ago as it is today, and my skills then were slightly less than they are now. But, in its current incarnation, WordPress 2.6 has lots of cool stuff I have not yet fully explored. <\/p>\n
More labyrinthine diversion, you say? Maybe. But unfortunate or not, labyrinthine diversion seems to be the upgrade path along which my creativity has chosen to lead me. <\/p>\n
Besides that, WordPress has custody of almost everything I have written since 2001, and if the only reason for keeping WordPress was just to avoid transposing all that old content, that would be enough. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
OK, another web publishing platform. Only this one seems to offer a more comprehensive tool set over that offered by WordPress. This is bad, and good. WordPress does one thing–blog publishing–and does it well. Joomla promises to be a complete … Continue reading