June 18, 2018

So this is the last post on the What's-It

Well, folks, I must admit defeat. I had intended to keep up at least a tally here, a list of links, noting in this space all my posts in all the various places that I post things. That's ideally how I'd like it to be, a central blog as the origin of all posts, which would stand as a comprehensive repository for "content" as well as an index of activity.

I've used this blog that way for nearly eighteen years, until the current Troubles -- it's very useful to have a searchable index of your life and I truly miss it. However, the What's-It in its current crumbling condition simply doesn't lend itself well to that role. I can't post images, the archives are unstable, sometimes the whole thing just disappears... and it's not all that easy to share native posts from here anyway, since the images and resources have to be strategically minimal. It's an ancient version of Movable Type, but as it stands it is too fragile to update -- previous attempts have been disastrous. I've tried deleting images and so forth (and in fact I had to delete a couple to be able to post this.) Doing that seems to have helped a bit with some of the gremlins. But deleting things defeats the purpose.

I really dislike the current, fragmented version of the internet and would love to return to the more rational world of "one man, one website" but it's not the world we have. (Imagine that, doing one definitive post rather than a dozen scattered ones that are likely to be hidden anyway based on secret criteria you can never manage to discern. We didn't realize how good we had it in 2002.)

Anyway, I meant to link to everything here as a stop-gap while I figured out something else to do, but the last time I managed a post on this blog, as you can see, was nearly two months ago. So that plan is not working. What I want to do is to start a new blog that is more stable and start using that as my main platform, leaving this up as an archive (if indeed it "stays.") I will do it eventually. But till then, the best way to keep up with what I'm doing is to follow my Minds.com channel or my On Google page. (I do a weekly link round-up the Google channel that is fairly comprehensive.) It's not quite the same as a blog but most of my substantial "content" is at least noted there.

So this is the last post on the What's-It (until the new thing materializes if it ever does -- in which case there will be a sort of "go here" post.) Last post. Feels weird, but apt.

Posted by Dr. Frank at June 18, 2018 04:13 PM