Rants, Raves, and Ramblings

So I coded my own journal. Instead of imitating the millions of others in this world who have both internet access and an inflated sense of self-importance, I have decided that it would be better to reinvent the wheel and create a blogging engine entirely from scratch. Why, you ask? Well, there’s a lot to that answer, which I will outline below. But first, some background.

My history with various blogging services is a short, but nevertheless highly dissatisfying one. My first experience was with LiveJournal, which I think was really the first successful commercial blogging site; prior to that, the term ‘blog’ was packaged with server-side programming scripts you could use with your personal website in order to document your everyday happenings. These were, of course, not the easiest thing to incorporate into your personal web site (of which there were many, because people didn’t rely on blogs to be their internet portal of choice yet) unless you had some pre-existing knowledge of server-side scripting (which most people didn’t). Adoption of the blogging concept was slow until services like LiveJournal came out to make the whole thing easier for people. Of course, you lost some control in terms of layout, flexibility, and content…but most people didn’t seem to mind this.

Anyways, I created this LiveJournal account at the encouragement of an internet friend of mine, who sold me on the bonus incentive that if I had a LiveJournal account, I could view her ‘private’ posts. Naturally, this intrigued the voyeur in me. What sort of perverse secret things could I learn about this person? It’s a free account, so you won’t lose any money…why not? (I maintain to this day that a good portion of blogging accounts exist solely for the purpose of reading the mystical ‘friends-only’ posts that we all subconsiously think is our gateway to forbidden information, only to be faintly disappointed when we discover that these are usually about as interesting as the public entries.)

So after creating this journal and reading through tons of mildly interesting private entries on my friends journal, I found myself at a bit of a quandary. I’ve gotten what I wanted out of the journal, but wouldn’t it be a waste if I didn’t do anything with it? The urge to join the bandwagon and start blogging came over me. The problem, however, was that after much soul-searching, I realized I had absolutely nothing I wanted to say – at least, not to the swarms of anonymous and unknown random web users who might happen to stumble across my blog. I could, perhaps, get all my friends to join, thus perpetuating the growth of this LiveJournal thing like some high-tech Amway, trapping them with the promise of tantalizing friends-only posts…but I could save everyone a lot of time and trouble by just continuing to talk to them on a regular basis. (This, incidentally, is also the more manageable solution of the two, despite what popular opinion of internet technology may tell you.)

So really, what was the purpose of this thing? I couldn’t figure it out for the life of me. I ultimately decided to look at other LiveJournals to look for an example of what to post. Maybe this will help me understand what these things are really meant for, I thought. What I found served only to further perplex and, dare I say, disgust me.

I started with the friends of my online friend…you know, the one I made the account for in the first place so I could read her private posts. She had probably about 15-20 different ‘friends’, according to her user profile, so I started picking ones to view at random and then delving into what they saw fit to share about their lives to everyone on the internet. I was disappointed in every single one, although for different reasons: a few people had completely ‘friends-only’ accounts, so there wasn’t anything to read unless I managed to convince this person to friend me somehow; a few others seemed to speak in a cornucopia of inside jokes and references to first names that I couldn’t distinguish or put a personality to; and others still just catalogued every detail of their mundane and uneventful lives in an unprecedented volume of entries.

Is this what LiveJournals are used for? I mean, it was different when I read my friend’s journal; at least when she rattled off people’s names I knew who they were (for the most part), and when she catalogued her daily events, I was occasionally a part of them. But I realized that that stuff is really only interesting to a handful of people…and that those people probably already know everything she’s posting about. The entire thing just seemed needlessly redundant. I posed the question then that I still do to this day; do you really need a blog, or are you just doing it because you can? I can already answer that question for you in 99.9% of circumstances…

It seemed a foregone conclusion in my mind that nobody really needs an online journal. Some of my friends, however, held exactly the opposite sentiment; they felt that one wasn’t enough. I would come to find out that a few of my friends actually had multiple LiveJournal accounts…creating a second one to be what they called a ‘private journal.’ It seems that the private journal entry feature in their journal wasn’t enough; they needed a second journal, which they kept secret from all but a select few of the closest friends. Amazing.

Despite my cynicism about the whole thing, I tried to post some entries anyways. It didn’t work. Every time, I just rambled off frustrations that were gone by the time I read the entry a day later, making me realize how unlike me this journal would appear to other people who didn’t know me very well. Either that or i’d write up random facts about things in my daily life that bored me just to type them. The entire thing was a colossal disaster. I felt like a worse human being for doing it. I felt stupid.

It wasn’t that I was embarassed or ashamed of my mood swings or boring life; it was just that it seemed pointless and an exuberant waste of effort to go through with typing these things out and putting them online. I felt like it was sort of self-aggrandizing to think that my personal opinions as a meritless youth and angsty rants were somehow worthy of all the resources it took to put that web page up in the first place (I hold a certain respect for web space on the internet…strangely). I felt selfish; self-absorbed; self-important; and a myriad of other unpleasant adjectives that begin with ‘self’. I also felt that there was sort of a disconnect, and that this whole journal concept was just adding an artificial barrier of communication between me and my friends; I was spending time trying to put all my words into a journal instead of just talking to my friends, which was much easier and much more rewarding.

I eventually couldn’t take it anymore and deleted the journal. My friend was disappointed, but not crushed or anything. Through the next few years, I would try the whole thing over again, often for the same reasons and always with the same results. I tried some of the other more popular services, all of which cater to a different sort of internet-enabled cretin:

• LiveJournal – Pretentious college students (mostly liberal arts majors) and other trendy hipsters with black horn-rimmed glasses who enjoy discussing the finer points of various ‘indie’ bands and making ‘ironic’ 80′s pop culture references
• DeadJournal – Goth-leaning alternative to LiveJournal, populated mostly by high school students wearing 20 pounds of crushed velvet who will one day be liberal arts majors in college
• GreatestJournal – Otaku-leaning alternative to LiveJournal, which i’m guessing probably has a secret community dedicated to furries
• Xanga – Catch-all for internet users with no appreciation for aesthetics or basic web coding (unlike the overly-artsy LiveJournal/DeadJournal users); mostly people under 13 and over 35
• MySpace – Notorious haven for sex offenders, spam, and people who prefer their web pages to be at least 75% advertisements
• Blogspot – Artsy people; actually the most tolerable blogging service as far as users go for some reason

One noteworthy alternative to the commercial blogging service industry is the use of WordPress, which seems to have become the defacto mechanism for implemeting an ‘individual’ blog to one’s personal website. It’s basically the evolution of that server-side script I mentioned earlier that no one wanted to use because it was beyond most people’s comprehension. I was actually fairly disappointed to see some fellow alumni of the Whitmer Networking program make use of WordPress, instead of coding their own blogging system (especially the latter two, given their affinity for PHP and programming in general). Not to demean their character, but I wish more of the DIY ethic that helped build the internet would continue forward to the next generation of internet engineers who are still growing into their careers.

If you haven’t gathered, i’m not fond of WordPress. It does a good job at what it does, and i’m glad something exists out there as an alternative to the commercial blog services, but to me, it still lacks any capability for a real nice, individualized layout. I can tell when a journal is made by WordPress just by the look and feel of it; and instantly, I feel like its that much less personal, thus defeating the purpose of a good blog. I’d rather someone just made the entries themselves manually in straight HTML. That’s sort of nitpicking, but I reserve the right to be anal about stupid things like that.

If nothing else, these journals are an amazing insight into what people think is important or valuable enough to share with the world; they are also excellent indicators of the emotional exhibitionism that plagues more of our populace than we’d like to admit. It’s not too difficult to tell when a journal exists to inform or entertain it’s readers, and when it merely to serve the needs of the blogger’s ego.

So where does that put this journal? What’s so different about this attempt than any of the one’s prior? Mostly, it’s my own creation: every last bit of code that runs this comes from my own hand; I have 100% complete control over the layout, the features – everything. And I take a certain minute pride in knowing that. I like that no matter how great or how bad the site looks to someone, it’s a reflection of what I think is appropriate for the content within; an expression not only of my thoughts, but of my capabilities.

For me, the look and feel of a web page is just as important as the content in terms of expression. I am of the opinion that web design can be a form of creative expression as well as a method of delivering content; in other words, an art form. And the canvas on which you choose to paint says as much about your piece as any other element of it. Would I have chosen to use, say, a LiveJournal account to write what I intend to write in this journal, i’d have to accept the connotations and stereotypes associated with the users of that culture (and yes, it has grown into it’s own distinctive culture). It’d be much easier to be dismissed or categorized as the type of person LJ normally attracts, and I really want to avoid being pigeonholed like that.

Also different this time around is the fact that I believe I actually have something to say. Most of this blog will revolve in some way around the internet and computing technology in general, with a heavy dose of my personal thoughts as well. I’ve also felt the need to rant about a lot of things, and I think this journal would be an appropriate outlet for that. Given that the only people who’ll read this probably already know me, I get to avoid the horror of dealing with random internet personalities who want me to ‘check out their band’ or exchange shallow comments with them.

I knew this entry would be long, but not this long. I feel like there’s a few points I haven’t touched on, but those will have to wait for a future entry. In any event, if you’re reading this, do feel free to comment – i’d love to hear your thoughts on my thoughts, and I mean that with the utmost sincerity. I really hope i’m able to exchange genuinely meaningful conversation through this medium, unlike the vast majority of blog systems out there. Mostly because i’d hate to think that I coded this all for nothing.