I first put up a personal web a few years ago. I authored it in MS FrontPage, developed the navigation, populated it… and then nothing. Or not very much. Maintenance became a chore, the site was cramped (only 8MB), I could only update it from my home PC, which was useless (I spend a lot of my time at work or travelling or both), and the carefully constructed navigation became an inflexible roadblock to doing anything more. Oh, yes: the fact that it was authored in FrontPage meant that the HTML was horribly opaque: I didn’t actually understand the code on my own site.
Then my son Chris put up his blog SomethingUnderstood, and I was entranced by the simplicity of authoring. I tried out blogging at one of the various free blog sites, and found it straightforward but incomplete: I wanted a regular web alongside the blog. However by using a blog for primary content creation (both significant and ephemeral) I could develop the rest of the web using a much simpler structure.
I’m not sure that I’ll really turn this into a diary, like Bruce Sterling’s fun blog. Nor do I intend to use it as a soap-box for political screeds – though in today’s society we must all be political animals if we are not to be sheep. Let’s see how it goes.