Aug 29
How The Minister Got His Groove Back
The Ministry will re-open for business next week, albeit in a modified form.
My hiatus this summer (sic) did not really rekindle my desire to get back into the blogging saddle; or at least not in the way I had expected.
Every blog seems to have a shelf-life. Maybe the Ministry is reaching its expiry date. (It celebrated its 1,000th-day birthday just last week.)
However, I think at least part of my problem is Wordpress. To be honest, I have come almost to loathe Wordpress.
To quote the rather good tech hack Andy Ihnatko:
Wordpress is as simple as it can possibly be. Which is not to say that it's as simple as anything can be...
I had two illusions about Wordpress development:
"You can find an existing Wordpress theme that looks like the site you want. Download it, activate it, tweak it a little, and you're there."
Not really. There are thousands of free, professional themes for Wordpress that'll take you 75% of the way, but that's a bit like a ship that will take you 75% of the way to the Sun. You're still about 25,000,000 miles short so pack a lunch and wear comfortable shoes.
Also, good luck finding "a theme that's 75% close" to what you want. There are search engines that let you click and select sertain features ("Three columns," etc.) but on the whole you want a single checkbox that reads "C'mon, you know what I mean." It ain't there.
The power of Wordpress is its integration into the larger WP community of plugins and services. These things only work if the theme supports 'em. I quickly found myself back in my classic AppleScript Quandary, where I'd want to incorporate a feature to simplify posting, but the effort of writing that feature and making it work correctly far outstripped the effort required to just do it by hand every time, over my entire lifetime.
"I want to use this plugin with my theme."
"Okay: so here's how to incorporate support for the plugin architecture..."
If you've never got your fingernails dirty backstage in Wordpress that may not mean much to you. To me, it rings far too many bells: I am fed up with Wordpress's all-too-regular security updates that have to be applied every few weeks and, in being applied, break one or more of the plugins you have to utilise to make Wordpress user-friendly. And, while it's not exactly rocket science, Wordpress's composition interface just isn't as easy to use as it could be. If you want to embed audio or video, in particular, you just end up crossing your fingers and hoping for the best when you press the 'Publish' button. If you were designing a blogging platform in today's meultimedia-rich Web, you simply wouldn't duplicate Wordpress.
I have been exploring other options over the summer.
I began by looking at Twitter. I'm not sure what I was expecting to find there but I figured that all the meeja hors creaming themselves about Twitter must be on to something, rather than just being a bunch of bleating sheep herding themselves into a frenzy of mutual masturbation.
Turns out that they really are a bunch of bleating sheep herding themselves into a frenzy of mutual masturbation.
Now, please don't get me wrong: in its rightful place, there's nothing wrong with mutual masturbation. But really, Twitter's a massive crock of steaming shit. I've been 'following' on Twitter some writers, comedians and musicians I admire in the hope that I might also admire their 'Tweets'.
It transpires that all 140 characters is good for is an endless stream of knob gags (Charlie Brooker, take a bow) and txtspk wnk.
(You can 'follow' me @minitruecouk: I never tweet and I rarely bother to look at the account, so it probably won't waste your time as much as 'following' most other Twats. Having never posted anything, I have one 'follower', a spammer: that's everything you need to know about Twitter.)
Sorry, but I just don't see Twitter as anything more than an overhyped flash-in-the-pan like Friends Reunited, MySpace and Facebook before. I have almost-pristine and long-deserted accounts on all of those networks, too.
Then I tried Tumblr. Which taught me that I am at least 20 years outside its demographic. What the fuck is Gossip Girl, anyway?
After that, I bought and trialled blogging-specific software for the Mac called Blogo, which I quite like and which certainly provides a better user experience than Wordpress but doesn't entirely float my boat. I'll continue to use Blogo from time-to-time, but it won't be my main blogging interface.
Next, I designed and (with the help of a freelance coder) built a personal website that incorporates a blog using Drupal instead of Wordpress as its base: I like it, but it's not right for the Ministry. (While it is still under heavy construction, and will be for some time, I do intend to maintain and develop that website and blog; some blog content will be duplicated between that site and the Ministry, but each will focus on different themes and both will have exclusive content. If you want the URL, let me know.)
None of these routes totally slaps my kipper and until last weekend I was genuinely considering closing the Ministry.
Then I discovered Posterous.
Posterous is fucking brilliant. I don't often get evangelical (and I'm certainly not on commission) but Posterous is one of the websites that - like Spotify - threatens to be good enough to change the way people use the t'Internet.
You want to blog? Send Posterous an email.
You want to embed multimedia on your blog? Email Posterous the YouTube URL or the MP3 file. It does the rest instantly.
You want to update a series of different blogs and networks, too (eg Facebook and Twitter)? Register your accounts and then email Posterous. Bang: it'll do it all for you.
There's a good, quick overview of Posterous here.
post@posterous.com: that and an email program is all you need.
And, as most of the visitors to the Ministry know to their detriment, I can email from just about anywhere if the mood takes me.
It's free. It works. I've fallen in love with it. It's so simple it hurts me that, having been addicted to email for 15 years, I didn't think of it.
I'm a tightwad at heart but I want Posterous to release a premium offering just so I can give it some money - something I'm not prepared to do with Spotify, at least not until it offers a genuinely compelling paid proposition.
(In fairness, it is at least theoretically possible to blog text - but not multimedia - via email in Wordpress. But if you can make it work, you're a better man than me. I've been trying intermittently for five years now and still not succeeded.)
Of course, Rupert Fucking-Murdoch will eventually buy Posterous and ruin it but in the meantime I have found my blogging appetite rekindled by its sheer simplicity, brilliant design and idiotproof ease of use. Everything I want to do, I can do in Posterous - and, from what I've seen, I can do it more easily and more conveniently in Posterous than in Wordpress.
So while the Ministry remains at its old home, that address is - for the foreseeable future - simply going to be duplicating the content I email to my Posterous.
I have until December to decide whether or not to renew the Ministry's domain name and - despite not being able to implement the Ministry's trademark black and fuschia theme - it's not beyond the realms of possibility that Christmas will see the Ministry relocate to Posterous permanently.
I'll leave it to you to decide whether you can take anymore of this and, if so, where and how you'd like to take it - fnar, fnar.
Next up (probably): a music-related post I've been working on for about six weeks. So it'd better be good, but more likely will simply be self-important.
So - oddly, after all I've said - it's kind of good to be back.
Filed under //
Personal
t'Internet
