Posts Tagged ‘writing’

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Hello World! Part II

In Blog on January 30, 2011 by martin Tagged:

This “starting over” is taking longer than expected .. much longer! This is, at least in part, due to an absolutely crazy work schedule and serious writer’s block.

There are so many topics in my head, but none of them seem to get me to the keyboard. In stead of working on new posts, I find myself tweaking theme settings or transferring posts from my old website. It’s really strange. After all, this is a hobby and not work — I should be pouring over new ideas, word-smith for the fun of it, post short musings from my iPhone at every coffee break just because I can.

Nope .. nada .. zilch .. nothing .. not a word, let alone sentence.

Sure, I tweet .. sometimes quite a bit. But tweets are really just appetizers. One can rant across several tweets, but it’s not very coherent. And while the 140 character limit poses some interesting challenges, tweeting is really more akin to shouting to crowd very everybody is already shouting.

The original idea for this site was to write a travel blog of sorts. I have traveled quite throughout the years — both for work and pleasure — and I thought that I would write about my experiences. Of course, a few things happened on the way to travel blog nirvana: first, I realized that I that my travels, while frequent, really weren’t that exciting. Let’s face it, a road warrior’s life racing from city to city to attend meetings in nondescript office parks in anywhere USA is usually not very exciting.

Another thing that happened was life: I got a new job that is almost a polar opposite what I’ve done before. For one, I hardly travel at all and it actually feels great. I still travel a bit, but it’s negligible — at least when compared to previous lives. I also work mostly from home so I don’t even have commuter stories to tell.

Now, writing — for me — is DIY-therapy and in a sense this blog is still about travel: maybe less about traveling from point A to point B and more about my journey through life. The name “Many Miles” refers to both geography and time, and I try to write about what I see on the road and experience in life.

This switch to a new website has had me think quite a bit about what I really want to write about. A new website is almost like a clean slate. Many of my posts on my old website were quite personal. But just as my tweets have changed to take on more political topics, I’m sure, so will my posts.

So, that’s it for now.

 

PS. I recently read Chris Hedges book “Empire of Illusion” and am now reading his “Death of the Liberal Class.” Both books are great and they definitely have helped me connect a few dots.

Post

Hello world!

In Blog on January 6, 2011 by martin Tagged:

Starting over .. again! .. with the blog that is. I’ve decided that I no longer want to self-host my blog. The main reason is that I focus more on writing and spend less time futzing with the site infrastructure. After all, building and maintaining websites is my “day job” and I don’t really feel the need to spend even more hours coding.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I still love digging into some serious code. My “old” site was based on Drupal v6, and, with v7 finally available, it’s due for an upgrade. My alter ego is running a few more Drupal sites, and while those will be upgraded, “many-miles.com” will be migrated.

I looked at several platforms (including Tumblr, Blogger, and Posterous), but decided that a hosted WordPress site would be a better fit for this blog. The comparison wasn’t very scientific, but the main criteria were:

  • advanced feature set, without getting in the way of writing
  • easily customizable and extensible
  • support for comments, something that Tumblr, for example, doesn’t support
  • support for iPhone blogging tools, something that most platforms have today
  • support for custom URLs, which WordPress offers as a premium service

Again, this is not meant to be a detailed technical side-by-side. Rather it’s a list of criteria that are important to me.

Now, there is one more change to “many-miles.com” .. my posts will focus more on social issues and will be tied more closely (at least in theme) to my tweets. There is a lot going on in our world and I often feel the need to vent/rant.

That’s it for now!

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