Every Blog Has Its Day
Summary: This site has moved to
www.starsite.me.uk
However this blog will remain for historical reasons and also as a third 'backup' of my blogs. This site was officially abandoned at 6:52pm on the 10th July, 2005.After two loyal years of service I am bidding a fond farewell to Blogger, who have been my generous hosts since the very inception of Starsite. Predating this blog were many previous websites, most of nominal value, but I can say hand on heart that this one is the one that has given me the most pleasure and is easily the most rewarding. I will take you on a brief history lesson before getting onto the fundamentals of why I have chosen to relocate and how this affects the site.
Starsite began on a whim: it was the start of a very long summer, and I soon realised that besides watching television and going for long runs not much else would fill my day. Those were the days when summers were lazy and workless, where each day would be met with a wide-eyed relish for new opportunities and novel undertakings. Taking the Tete approach to curing boredom, I started experimenting with a new activity each day. After trials with sewing, kayaking and crocodile wrestling I came to the swift conclusion that a long-term engagement would be necessary as the above all involved some sort of financial outlay, and I was adamant that I would not get a job. Looking back, they were the best days of my life, and I know now that I will not reach such a state of perpetual and unending ease until well into my retirement years.
I had resisted the Blogger craze that had worked its way round my social clique for some time, citing reasons of inability to maintain the site as principle excuse, but without the boundary of time I soon realised that I, indeed, could afford to spend a half hour each day updating a journal. The reason, then, to begin blogging came out the precise vice I warn against- blogging out of boredom. But as the posts began to mount in number I soon realised that there were uncountable reasons as to why I'd decided to blog, only that boredom was the trigger.
The inaugural post was a humourful piece about disliking midgets; a subject matter that only came to me as a way of handling my dislike, at the time, for a certain midget. The theme of blogging as catharsim has been prevalent ever since, as recently as the "changing seasons" blog. I am, and have always been, unashamed to pour my personal feelings onto this site (in a watered-down manner: I'm not out to cause personal offence) often using humour as a barrier to getting 'too personal.' The subject matter would routinely shift from serious to humour, as my mood dictated, and the posts were as jumbled and unrelated to each other as I wanted. Afterall I was creating a journal, not a novel, so the posts never stuck to any format. They could be long, short, deep, shallow, pointless or meaningful as to how I felt at the given moment. The great thing about creating your own blog is that I could create my own rules, and mould the site to my liking.
All this had been very well until recently. As any blog ages it matures or develops accordingly along with the writer, and I have found myself writing better and in a more regimented style than the early days, with a more regular blogging frequency and recognisable writing style. One of the reasons to keep a blog was to entertain others, or to allow a portal into my personal life and in a way to help organise my life in a way that only self-reflection can do (writing as reflection). Yet as the site grew, its subject matter became distanced and cluttered, and entirely irretrievable to outsiders seeking to know or read an aspect of my life.
When I had a hit counter installed several months ago that logged web searches it dawned on me how specific people were being. If someone searched for "Loughborough University" they would find a singular post regarding their search term. After which, what were they to do? What would I do if I wanted to find posts about, say, drinking games? The long and short of it is that Blogger archives for date only. And while this was sufficient when the site was small, it has been a severe hindrance since. So I needed a solution to my problem, because I didn't want people coming to my site and seeing ten unrelated posts and then clicking elsewhere because what they wanted to read is hidden amongst reams of other posts in ambiguously-titled archives.
I tried to implement an "all posts" drop-down menu, but I soon learned that Blogger restricts this function to only ten. The reasons for this are beyond me, but I was repeatedly reassured that there was no way to increase the post title printout beyond ten. Very, very annoying. So I stuck with a "recent posts" drop-down menu, which is pretty unhelpful when they are all present on the homepage already, but it was marginally better than nothing.
Furthermore I tend to title my posts as cryptically as possible like a good film maker ("Jaws," "Ocean’s Eleven," "The Ring"- doesn't say much about the film now, does it?), and this works to a degree if you know what to expect. Sorting a website by post titles works if you are reviewing things, but it is not so helpful when you are writing a personal weblog. Titling a post about University "then there was one" does little to help the reader, so I had to find a solution to this conundrum too.
After much searching, to cut a long story short, I found the answer. While I
could just buy a domain and code my own website off the back of my own knowledge, I would struggle a lot with the more complex aspects of php like initiating an archive system or coding my own statistics. Being as busy as I am, I do not have the time to recode my own website and learn to program-in complex equations to calculate the number of words the site has as well (something I like to know and Blogger handily tells you in the profile... if it hadn't been frozen for the last 8 months). Eventually, and with much trialling, I found the perfect solution.
It is called
Wordpress and bridges the gap between myself and super-knowledgeable geek. What it does is allows you to essentially take control of everything about your website, but gives you the tools to "plugin" parts that are very complicated to code like word-counting algorithms. Being a blog-like interface, Wordpress allows you to manage your site by date (archives), blog titles, blog excerpts, category... you name it. It makes the whole process more dynamic and functional for both the blogger and the reader, and the advantages are too numerous to count especially for larger websites.
The possibilities are endless. I can now password-protect posts if I so choose, I can allow people to upload photos or videos to my site, I can manipulate and print posts in a beautiful array under whatever terms I so desire, I can alter every last part of the site now and finally be free of the disadvantages that working with a program for the masses like 'Bugger' affords. While the basic premise may seem unexciting, maybe even a little tedious, to you, I have decided to look at this site from the viewpoint of someone who's never been before.
The "about me" section is now much more accessible to someone frantically clicking around hyperspace. Within ten seconds people know who I am, what I look like, interesting facts about me and who this site appeals to. The top banner image is a glorious, and beautiful, panoramic taken from the Hubble space telescope of deep space with a giant cosmic cloud obscuring sparking stars representing countless galaxies that we dare dream to imagine. As an artistic image, it is open to interpretation; you can take it as you like, but whatever you take from it you cannot escape its overwhelming beauty. Underneath that (currently, although this is all subject to change) are the archives (self-explanatory), the categories for people interested in certain aspects of the site and some brief statistics to spell out the relative size and worth of the site. There may be more to come in the future, but for the time being this is enough as a bare-bones start. The meaty flesh can be added later, but new features will only be added if they are necessary and add some worth to the site.
I've put a lot of thought and work into this new site, enough, I feel, to do justice to the 200,000 words I have currently written. As an on-going project, I needed to break away from the limitations of Blogger to continue in a way that I could be content with. Incidentally, I chose a ".me.uk" domain above a ".com" because the "me" refers to personal websites (typically blogs, as it so turns out) and "uk" evidently refers to my rough geographical location. And as "starsite" was free, I decided to snap it up at less than the price of a pint for two whole years. Not free, I'll give you that Blogger, but at 2-3 pence a week, close enough.
Other notable changes outwith the whole framework and site navigation changes include an unfortunate culling of Beefy's posts. After less than fifteen posts, I do not feel that his posts add anything really to the site now unlike they did back in those days, where his infrequent blogging was a welcome break from my tireless posting. Announcement posts, on the whole, have joined the cull along with other irrelevant 'news' posts such as Scottish Boozing alterations, Google rankings and so on. If you miss them so much, which I sincerely doubt you do, they are on and will continue to be available to read on the old star-site.blogspot.com account, including all of Beefy's posts. It will be left as a freeze-frame of old, for those who stumble on it and also for historical reasons.
There are still some remnants of Blogger hidden in the posts on this new website, such as the infuriating substitution of "?" for "?," but these will all be ironed out in due course. The comments have all been brought over too as I feel they are all relevant and some posts tweaked somewhat, but on the whole it's a faithful copy of the old site. Embarrassing, untrue, shameful and petty posts all stay, because Starsite has never been about rewriting the past or holding back on strong opinion, although having said that future posts may be locked if the content is deemed too offensive for certain audiences. It saves a lot of ill feeling, as I have found out once too often when someone like me has a long-standing blog and uses it to voice an honest and forthright opinion that is read by the post’s target audience or individual.
I hope I have managed to communicate to you the importance of updating this blog to cope with the new demands being placed on a site so large. With over 200,000 words spread across 220 posts I can't rely on people, or even myself, to carefully trudge through the archives to find articles that are relevant or read-worthy to the reader. Hopefully now the site is a more accessible, dynamic and pleasurable experience for old readers, new readers, and those merely passing by on their mad rush through cyberspace.
