This new blogging setup, with the new domain, new feeds, and ideally new workflow, suggest the analysis of what was problematic with the old one.

Back when I was a PhD student, doing everything I could to avoid work on my thesis, I stumbled upon a culture of Lisp and Free Software developers – which may only come across as half ridiculous now but in 2001 seemed doubly counter-cultural. And so I joined a blogging platform for Free Software types that also happened to double as a testbed for trust metric research. And at the time, this offered neat features not easily available elsewhere: the word “blog” itself was only about two years old, and pertelote maintained a blog by hand for years, so having somewhere which would host my writing, and which moreover had some of the Social Network about it (the advogato userbase was responsible for certification of individuals' contribution to Free Software, and several of my then collaborators were on advogato before me) was ideal.

The principal downside for me, then as now, is the use of web browsers as the interface for text entry; a <textarea> just isn't rich enough in functionality. The situation is better now than it was – (mostly) gone are the days when an incautious C-q would instantly close all browser windows, including the one in which your meticulously-crafted draft was waiting for final polish before being submitted as a diary entry – but it's still a long way from using my text editor, moderately customized to my way of working, with all the comfort that that brings.

Meanwhile, for work, I've successfully used ikiwiki to document the processes and data around some of my academic administrative responsibilities over the years: postgraduate tutor, employability coordinator, director of postgraduate studies (the reality is even less glamorous than these titles); it's been really nice to be able to update documents while not at my desk, or while commuting, and even if I have never grown to love mercurial (ikiwiki's at-one-time default DVCS backend) it is at least worth knowing.

So when contemplating how to set up systems less likely to impede my productivity, it's perhaps natural that I should return to a recent success, and set up an ikiwiki instance. This time, though, I'm (obviously) explicitly using ikiwiki's support for blogging as well as its natural wiki nature; the idea is that the weblog is for timely, pertinent comments, while the wiki is for incrementally-refined notes on all subjects – probably replacing my org-mode note-taking habit, which while lovely relies too much on having a single emacs instance available at all times for when inspiration strikes. I fully expect to keep the org-mode setup I have for Getting (Some) Things Done, but will likely migrate the non-actionable notes I have to this wiki as and when.

Speaking of new feeds, the advogato tag will be punned into denoting content that should be syndicated to my diary on advogato. It's perhaps inevitable that something will go wrong, and including html tags in the text of the first syndicated entry is an excellent way to ensure that that happens, so if there's an editable textarea, escaped less-than and greater-than signs, or a sentence that seems to be missing something, then the Unix-Haters among the readers can reminisce about seeing >From in their e-mails oh wait that still happens...