I mentioned reinvention, didn’t I? One of my goals for this revision process was to find away to entwine my two weblogs together into a single strand, like it was in the beginning. I was disturbed by my neglecting of the main weblog in favour of posting links by the bucketful; on the other hand, having just a linklog isn’t enough for me and I need that space to record longer-form thoughts, or photographs, or pretty much anything that isn’t a link.
So what I did was, I changed the names. The old weblog becomes the macrolog, while the linklog becomes the microlog. Simple, eh? One weblog, two components: one for big thoughts, one for little. Suddenly the parts seem like a whole again. Which ever strand I add to — macro or mirco — I’ll be adding to the completeness. And because of this, I won’t feel so guilty for leaving huge gaps between longer entries. Everybody wins! It’s funny how semantics can change your perceptions like that.
As for the front page? Well, in a perfect world there’d be some Feedburner-esque method of entwining the separate strands together into a single rope, akin to what Kottke did for his main page. But I’m not about to spend a week hacking MT with my limited skills to get it working the way he did. I’m a ‘plug-and-play’ kinda guy. No pun intended.
So what I did was, I set up the main page to display only entries from the microlog. Then I added links to my macrolog posts to the microlog, with a nifty trick using CSS and the category label tag to style those entries differently from the rest. So now everything tumbles down the page, nicely twisted together. It’s an awkward way to do it, sure, but I had to improvise. Very crafty of me.
Speaking of tumbling, I think it’s pretty obvious that the new front page is inspired by what the tumbleloggers have done/are doing. But it’s not a tumblelog like theirs. It’s still the same old weblog I’ve been keeping for four years. Only it’s got some new boots and panties. Jack calls it a ‘tumbly weblog’, which I think is spot on.
Expect to see some new things going on here over the next few weeks. (For ‘new’, read ‘shamelessly stolen off other bloggers far better than I’.) Also, expect the usual tweaks here or there, as everything settles. And above all, dear reader, stick along for the ride.