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the movabletype years

my name in print

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the movabletype years

Movabletype was the answer to all my problems. Unlike Blogger, Movabletype was loaded on my server, meaning that my ability to post new entries had nothing to do with whether it was peak hours and thousands of others were trying to post at the same time. On top of it, Movabletype was vastly more customizable and offered the ability to include comments.

In conjunction with yet another redesign of blueflower.org in July 2002, I made the switch to Movabletype. Importing my old entries from Blogger wasn't as easy as MT made it sound. In fact, to this day I've never gotten it to work. As a result, I now had my archives split between Blogger and Movabletype. That's a small price to pay for a little bit of dependability. By July 21, 2002, I had Movabletype loaded on my server, my redesign was done, MT was configured, and I made the switch.

After making the switch, things went smoothly and I no longer had publishing problems. What did cause problems was a growth in popularity of the site. First, Google discovered my site and started cataloging all the pages. This brought thousands of errant visitors in search of pretty much anything except what was actually on my website. It also brought a reporter from Appleton's own Post-Crescent.

Post-Crescent columnist Steven Hyden found my website via a search engine and dropped me an email asking if he could interview me for an article he was writing on weblogs. Me? In the newspaper? How could I resist? I consented, and Mr. Hyden interviewed me via telephone one day. About two weeks later, a photographer came over and snapped photos of me to accompany the article. Finally, the article ran as the main piece on page one of the Life and Style section on June 14, 2003. For the next week, my traffic shot up dramatically. I had gotten my fifteen minutes of local fame. Everyone I saw at work and in the bars mentioned seeing me in the paper. I ran into people I hadn't seen since high school, and they all remarked about having seen me in the paper. Of course, it didn't last.

The combination of the Google listings and the newspaper article brought many new visitors to the site, most of which were unwanted. The worst side effect of the website's popularity was the neverending deluge of spam comments. All of a sudden I found myself wasting hours of my time deleting spam comments for porn sites and prescription drugs, which made having comments on the website a bigger pain than it was worth. On top of it, I was starting to get harassing comments from random people. Granted, the ones from my brother were warranted, as a quick view of the entries on the weblog will show that I wasn't too kind to him on this website over the years. On the other hand, some of the ones from other people were a little more frightening, as I didn't know from whom they came.

I also started losing interest in writing. Between July 2003 and July 2004 I never wrote more than eleven entries in a month. My life had become very boring. I worked fifty hours per week, after which I hung out at a bar until closing time, then came home, went to bed, and started all over again the next day. That lifestyle didn't offer a lot of inspiration for writing. Seeing a decline in both the quantity and quality of my entries - and no longer wanting to air my dirty laundry all over the internet for anyone to read - I threw in the towel in July 2004.

One thing that really surprised me is that nobody who wasn't supposed to know my secret knew it. After the article was posted in the newspaper, some people from work had started reading my weblog as well. I had gotten accepted to graduate school at New York University in March 2004, but I didn't want anyone at work to know (especially my boss), because if your boss knows you're quitting in five months and can't afford to quit earlier, what reason does he or she have to treat you with any dignity? Excited about getting accepted, I posted about it on the website without thinking about the fact that people from work actually read the site. Like I said, surprisingly, nobody knew about my secret. When I turned in my two-weeks notice, it was apparently a huge surprise to everyone except the two co-workers to whom I had told the secret earlier.

Starting in July 2004, my website was reduced to little more than a links page once again. So little content made it pointless to even have a website, and I considered abandoning the whole thing. A month later, I moved to New York to start grad school. Suddenly I had lots to write about. By October, I started redesigning the website again, and finally re-launched the weblog on October 27, 2004.

So what was I to do with the old weblog entries? I had posted 1,230 weblog entries over a four year period. At first I considered just deleting them all. I mean, who wants to read all of my old weblog entries, right? After further consideration, I thought maybe I would delete most of them, but keep some of my favorites in some sort of "hall of fame". Finally, I realized that deleting any of them would be like deleting four years of my life, and embarrassing or not, I would keep them all. In conjunction with yet another site redesign in mid-2005, I created Blueflower.org Classic, which would house all of my old weblog entries and information about the history of the website.