[Warning: Nerd content and authorial navel gazing below.]
When I started my blog, I promised myself I might fret over things I write but I’d never spaz out over “content management”. I’ve done so. I’ve been so careful to avoid “content management” that I hate the term “content”.*
“Content” is the kind of vocabulary used by folks who can’t create but want to be “creation adjacent”. It emphasizes transmission over subject. It reminds me of Calvin and Hobbes where the kid tries to float a fancy cover page past a teacher who’s seen it all. “Content” considers everything equal and beneath the importance of the technology delivering the message. The medium of transmission should never surpass in importance the thing being transmitted! The glorious prose of Shakespeare, a fruitcake recipe, and the shit some thug scrawls on the side of a boxcar with spraypaint… these are not the same.
Anyway, there’s intent and there’s reality. I held out for years but could avoid it no longer. I’ve been forced to address some behind the scenes maintenance. This cost me $65 in software and 3 hours in hassle… and more will follow. Ugh! (I also pay a couple hundred to “self-host”. It’s worth it to be out of the wordpress.org sandbox but freedom ain’t free.)
Partly this is just deferred maintenance. Partly it’s a little bit of paranoia. I’m starting to wonder how much of everything is being used to train LLMs (counterfactually called AI). More importantly, how much I can opt out? I don’t have issue with AI (so long as it gets kneecapped whenever it comes up with even the slightest hint of a novel response there’s no “I” to go with the “A”). I do have issue with my dumb little blog going into the vat that made Frankenstein’s monster .
So… many posts may disappear. Don’t worry. What is not seen is still on archive on my private hard drive. Unless I screwed up my efforts this weekend. Yikes! That’s a loss I’d regret! Presumably, it’s still there. Theoretically, I can unearth it at will. Likely all I’ve done is avoid feeding the gaping maw of a LLM… maybe.
This is a delicate operation best done by a skilled practitioner of wordpress programming. I’m self-taught and my teacher was lazy. I’m coming at the wordpress database like a maniac with an axe. The whole thing may blow up!
If it does, I’ll come back… probably. Just be patient.
Thanks.
A.C.
P.S. In case you’re wondering, this burst of maintenance is good news because it’s related to squirrels. I’ve hammered out about half of another chapter. I’m about 9,000 words into a two chapter 25,000+/- word final stretch. The exciting conclusion isn’t written but it exists in my pointy head. Soon, though don’t hold your breath because I mean weeks and months not days and hours, the whole story will be finished. Huzzah!
*When tapping your feet to a Jimi Hendrix solo you don’t emote over the FM radio that received it or the FM station that broadcast it. Who gives a shit whether your radio is AC powered, bolted into your car, or handheld? What matters is that big booming power chord 32 seconds into Voodoo Child (Slight Return)! In a society that gets excited about the fucking radio, listen to the song!
Good luck!
Looking forward to the continuation of the squirrels.
Thanks.
I was listening to ‘All Along the Watchtower’ earlier. It’s wonderful.
Is Chigger going to make another glorious appearance? He is my spirit animal.
That’s a tough one. I have a short epilogue planned for Chigger but the darned book is getting long so I’m not sure about adding epilogues.
You’ll be happy to know that about 6,000 words into the draft chapter one of his mink speedos makes a guest appearance.
Boy, I hope no one ever invents some kind of internet archiving software.
I know you’re being sarcastic but I’m not worried about something like the wayback machine. Nothing I’ve written is worth a bot digging that deep. I just want to clean the path as time moves forward.
I’ve been a sysadmin since the 90s. Search and archiving bots are dime a dozen. Every site everywhere is in uncountable databases. Writing those bots was and maybe still is a good teaching tool for students.
The stuff is like gold. There’s personal data of the site owners, commenters can be correlated, the possibilities go on and on.
Web logs are great data sources, too. In the old days especially, it was too easy to think you’re typing in the log-in field, but the cursor is in the address field, you hit ‘send’ or the Enter key, and now your password or credit card number or etc in is the web server log.
Yep, that’s a good reason to move some of it from live to my hard drive.
passwords?
It’s just an experiment. Don’t fret. I’m thinking of locking up posts from years and years ago; not recent stuff.
>I’m thinking of locking up posts
lol
Nothing you do is going to work.
>The Internet Is Forever
is a real thing. But since it’s propi…propeit…owned by ‘them’, you may not see it, just like you’ll never see the data that Facebook collects.
Your data has value. Add it to the archived content of ‘related’ blogs with comments and edits and you can paint a nice picture of 1000’s (10,000s?) of individuals.
Don’t bury your head. Let your freak flag fly.
Yeah I get it. But there’s a time to quit hosting two thousand posts every day. If I can move a lot of stuff to some sort of “inactive but not deleted” state it’ll save me some effort in the long run.
Speaking of freak flags, I’ve been working on Attack of the Lesbian Activist Squirrels. It was a New Year’s resolution to wind up the story with a satisfying conclusion. I’m seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. That’s a good 120,000 words of non-politically correct satire in itself. I’m pleased at how it’s coming together.