Samuel's Blog

Hello again after a little while

February 15th, 2024 at 01:03am

Hello again, it has been a while.

Those of you who have been reading this blog for many years will recognise the pattern of silence for a long time, a sudden burst of activity, and then another long silence. Welcome to the end of another silence.

Seriously though, I recognise the pattern and a few times when I’ve thought about starting blogging again, I’ve also thought about how it’s not particularly fair on you, dear reader, to have me start writing again for a while and then disappear and leave you in the lurch. The main reason I can see for the long silences is that I usually only write about things which interest me to some extent, and I either end up with a whole heap of things to write in a backlog and realise how long it will take to write about them, and just don’t, or I write about things which start to make me so cranky that I don’t want to write about them any more.

So a few times, having recognised this pattern, I wondered whether it was really worth keeping the blog online if I wasn’t going to commit to using it again. After all, the history of it is archived in a few places including the National Library of Australia, so it wouldn’t be a wiping of history per se, and it does cost me a few dollars but not really that many to keep it online, but maybe I’m sentimental about it as I could never bring myself to actually shut the blog down and get rid of the hosting. There was always the possibility that I might find something to write about which I can be interested and motivated enough to write about on an ongoing basis.

Well, it so happens that there is something I can write about and probably even put some videos together about. I have had some discussions in recent days about this particular topic and can see it being viable. I’m going to keep you in suspense about what that topic is for the moment though.

Now, having something to write about is one thing. The question which remained with that was: if it’s a complete change of topic, do I keep this blog going or start again elsewhere? The main topic I’m thinking of isn’t a complete change for this blog as it has been a minor theme over the years and in fact some of the posts on that topic continue to receive a burst of traffic once per year. It won’t be the only thing I write about. I’d like to have a few more personal posts, which is where this blog started out way back when, and dial back the political posts a bit as politics has really left me quite disillusioned in recent years. That subject may very well be my next post!

There’s also something nice about moving away from some of the social media platforms and back to my own domain. Not entirely perhaps but to an extent. There’s an irony in how, back when Google Video and YouTube were just starting to gain prominence, I was opposed to the idea of uploading all of my videos there exclusively, insisting on having at least a copy of the video files available directly on this site; likewise I absolutely refused to use any of the photo album wesbites such as Flickr and had all of my photos here and on my own hosted photo gallery software. In both cases, handing over control of my content to some third-party who could do what they wanted with it and change their pricing structure at-will seemed like a terrible idea. Yet despite this, I, like just about everyone else with a personal blog, took to Facebook and Twitter and seemingly abandoned blogging.

I was chatting with a friend late last year about this move of personal bloggers from their own blogs to the major social media platforms. Blogs have, it seemed, survived for niche topics and evolved into something else for political sites, but not survived as much as personal journals. My plan is to keep this site running as a personal site but with some specific topics which have a fair bit of focus.

In order to do this, I think the site needs a bit of a tidy up. There’s a heap of dead links on the sidebar. The photo at the top of the page is probably 14 years old and could use an update. The theme of the site overall is dated, not that I mind things looking a bit old-fashioned, and in some ways I think it has aged well compared to many more modern-looking sites, but the site is not very mobile-friendly or even particularly scalable for modern desktop resolutions. Whether I persist with the current theme and make a few adjustments or change theme entirely is something I haven’t decided yet, but it’s safe to say there will be a few cosmetic changes.

At some stage, and it’s quite low on the priority list but will need to be looked at eventually, back in the day when I didn’t want to use Google Video or YouTube at all and simply embedded videos on this site directly, I did so in the Flash Video format with a Flash Player wrapper. Flash was killed off almost completely three years ago so those videos don’t play, although I did have the foresight at the time to link to copies of the videos in other formats so they’re not completely inaccessible. I thought about this when Flash was killed off at the end of 2020 as I was working somewhere which had a Flash based system as a key component managing various systems and even had its own custom Flash Player so it wasn’t susceptible to the built-in kill-switch in Adobe’s Flash Player. I will look at seeing how else I can embed those old FLV files at some stage, probably by transcoding them to some other format which modern browsers will play natively.

Anyway, I’m back on the blog and you will hear from me again soon. I look forward to writing some interesting things for you to read and enjoy, and hopefully find quite useful.

Samuel

Entry Filed under: Blog News

 Print This Post