Six months ago, when I came back to my blog archive, I hoped to turn it into something that I could use to restart this blog. Those early revisions were successful and set up the stable and manageable post structure I’m currently using to export. They also organized a non-laborious approach to writing posts that feels natural enough to live with. In a change that, in retrospect, I recognize as a transformative, I also devised a simple way to incorporate images and video anywhere on this site, an addition that made my archive of old post texts a tool for generating a genuine working blog.
Oddly enough, once that work was done, I stepped away from this blog for a couple months to set up a Wordpress site for my family. But when I came back a couple weeks ago, those changes from earlier in the year made all the difference. My reaction when I opened the file wasn’t the familiar “how can I make something of this disappointing thing?” Instead, I opened the file and was immediately excited by what was there, had ideas for how to make the blog better and for what I wanted to write. I’ve been working on those changes, and now have a site file organized to handle something I think of as “project posting.” It’s an idea—at root a small one—that I’ve dreamed of since my first attempt at a TBX-based blog and one that has me writing.
I’ll say more about how “project posting” works later, but an additional benefit of this new set-up is that it gives me a way to easily restore images to my old TBX posts. I’ve struggled with taking the time to do this: most of these posts are badly out of date, and I haven’t wanted to spend the time required to fix what amounts to relics. But relics aren’t junk, and these posts are the best traces I have of my early efforts to learn about TBX, HTML and CSS. They may not work as “how-tos” anymore, but they serve as memories and are important to me on those terms. With the new system cutting the time involved in restoring those images, I don’t feel conflicted anymore and am putting as many of those posts as I can back in their original state.
I’m also starting to poke around and experiment with content. I’m not really interested in doing public book and movie logs anymore, so remaking this blog has involved a lot of reflection about what I want it for and what I’d like to write. That reflection is ongoing, but my feet are under me and on stable ground, and my various experiments are happening here, in this file which I trust to work years from now. So I have time to figure it out bit by bit.
Finally it’s worth saying explicitly that all of this is possible because TBX maintains compatibility with previous versions of its action and export codes even as the software continues to develop at sometimes head-spinning speeds. I know I can set things in order in my file, then leave it for awhile, then come back to it and make things better, and then walk away again and etc and etc in a continual loop.
Which is another way of saying that TBX is made in a way that offers me time. Time to learn, time to reflect, time to build my way slowly and in stages toward discovery. This stability feels like a developer’s expression of respect for the work I do with their tool, and I can’t speak highly enough of Eastgate for choosing to work this way.
Posted October 31, 2024
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