The Bob takes a break

Short Version:
OK, so it’s not like I’m unaware of the fact that I don’t have much of an audience. I don’t feel bad about it. I mean, it’s a big bad internet out there, and I offer no porn, no news headlines, no life-altering insight… I offer slightly amusing stories that are probably less amusing if you don’t know me.

And maintaining my site/blog takes time. Time that I could be doing something else with. So I’m thinking, why not do something else with it? And so I think I will try that for a while.

It’s been real, it’s been fun, right? Eh.



Long Version:
Not long ago, I was perusing some Mac-specific sites when I read about a program by the name of Sandvox being updated to version 1.5.2. This intrigued me. As of today’s date, and for the past year & a half, I have maintained my website using a program called RapidWeaver, currently at verison 4.2. I moved to it because iWeb was limiting, and at the time I made the move it was between RW and Sandvox for my money. I gave the nod to RW obviously.

But I like to know what’s out there. Anyway, I downloaded the latest version of it, to try it out. And I got to tell you, I liked a lot of the things I saw. It seemed like it was more my style than RW. RW is powerful, but it’s also code-heavy. You don’t need to be a wizard to put together something, but it’s not as layout-friendly as Sandvox or iWeb, and honestly while I know some code, I use it mostly to parse certain things and pull them out (like files that the website doesn’t default to letting you have it). One of the things that intrigued me most was its handling of sidebar elements.

They’ve been a pain in my arse in RW since forever. Basically, you have two default options: you can either do each page’s sidebar individually, or you can select a page’s sidebar and then copy it to the rest of the entire site. Well anything in between is sort of an impossibility, you see. And the way this site is laid out, I have the blog and its child pages, the photo galleries under ‘photos,’ and everyone’s bios under “bios.” And to me, it made sense to want to keep the sidebars relatively stable within these groupings, but not bewteen them. I mean, I want my bios sidebars to be the same as all the other bios pages, but I want the photo pages to be similar only to the other photos pages. In RW, there’s no easy way to pull this off currently.

Let me make this clear: you can come close in RW, but it requires purchasing other plugins, either using the @stash plugin, or teaming up the Blocks pages plugin with pluskit, which is a bit more of a pain but also a little more capable in some circumstances. This all I found out when I went to RW’s forums to throw in a feature request for something similar to Sandvoxes handling of it. How does Sandvox do it?

They have what they call “pagelets,” which are basically just little widgets. You can add them to the sidebar of the main site template, and they will sync across all pages of the site (unless you ask a page to NOT inherit them). Also, you can specify on any parent page to have sidebar elements (widgets) you add to them be automatically inherited by all the children pages. This – to me – is an optimal arrangement. If I want the whole site’s pages to be identical, I can still do that by specifying widgets from the master template. If I want them on a per-page basis, I add them as such. If I want them across a subset of hierarchical pages – which I do – then I specify the widget as being a part of the parent page; all the children pages automatically get these elements on them, and updates to the widget span all pages that include it. Brilliant!

So anyway, I got to thinking about what I wanted to do. I was contemplating buying Sandvox at about $80, and porting my site to it, essentially. But some of the things I like about RW would be harder to duplicate in Sandvox. They could be done, but it would be labor-intensive, and part of the proposed move to was to get away from this labor-intensivity. But it would be more a one-time affair than a site-management way of life, so I was still considering it.

But then I got to thinking: why do all this labor anyway? What’s it for? I mean, what would I get out of it? I don’t have an audience; no one would be there to notice. I would spend $80 and many, many hours of labor transporting over my blog history, so that only I would notice. And all these cool sidebar things I was going to add, who would get anything out of them? That’s right, me, me & me alone. And suddenly, the monetary & time investment didn’t seem worth it. But what’s more, blogging in general didn’t seem worth it.

I don’t do this for money (at this point); you’ll notice no ads on my site as of yet. And if there were, I’d be getting nothing for them as no one stops by to click on them anyway. So far, I’ve done this for myself. I like to write and to tell stories from my own perspective. This has sort of been my journal, you know? But it’s been a pain-n-the-ass journal, what with formatting, linking, publishing & republishing, et cetera. Hell if I wanted to journal I could do it on my own computer for much less frustration.



Anyway
Anyway. So there you have it. I think I’m going to go silent for a while. I just don’t feel like I really have anything worth sharing that anyone really wants shared in the first place. I’m thinking there is an ever-so-tiny chance that this is a permanent thing, but I’ve been wrong before and I’d probably be wrong now too, so I’m not nailing the coffin shut exactly. But I am saying that the ‘bob will now be taking a hiatus. And if I DO come back, there’s also a chance it will be under the Sandvox Banner. I think. If I were. But probably not.