I haven’t posted for the past two months for a couple of reasons. General winter malasie, another reflective birthday turn of the clock, trying and failing to figure out what graduate school program I want to apply for, and a dissatisfaction with the way weblog writing was failing to fit in with my working thought process.
I’ve collected a lot of links in various text files I use to keep daily notes, but I haven’t found a good way to convert that material into blog entries. Just dumping the links onto the page feels like a waste. Part of what I value when reading other weblogs is the context and evalauation that comes with the links. The remaindered links or sidebars some other sites have don’t appeal either.
The other barrier is categorization versus keywords. I don’t really care for the way Movable Type handles categories. The interface just doesn’t seem very easy to use. Even harder is deciding on what to use for categories. I rarely have a category in mind when I post entries. Nor am I very good about going back over entries to see what categories emerge. I can assign keywords pretty easily to an entry at the time of composition, but how then to use them to create categories or classifications is a mystery.
I’ve been reading a bit about RDF and other markup languages, marvelling at the work of Paul Ford, from Ftrain, on the new Harpers magazine website, and thinking that what I should really be doing is working on my own custom program that fits into my own way of working. Perhaps use a text editor, and some simple macros, to create XML or some other markup. This could be a good project to work on for 2004.
