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OK, it's official...I'm leaving Diaryland for Blogger.com. I've long had a blog there and have copied and pasted every entry I made with Diaryland over to that one as well. But now Diaryland has slowed to a crawl, and the double-entry thing is getting old. For those of you who didn't even know that a site called Diaryland was involved, that's due to some clever (if I do say so myself) inline frame work. I set up a standard web site and opened a small window within it, pulling my Diaryland blog into the window. There were a lot of hoops to jump through to get it to work, but it was a way of using a blogging site's entry-cataloguing feature while still having my own site. But I no longer have the kind of free time that all those hoops required, and Blogger is more flexible than it used to be. So I've pointed my domain name to the new site and will be adding a redirect from the Diaryland one as well. There's some sadness in this...if I'm not updating at Diaryland, how will Mangofarmer know when I've written something new? She was one of my first readers, having followed me from a previous blog. And Gloamling and Minstrelite and Texile and Killsbury and Morticon, all long-time blog friends (who have, it turns out, almost all either left Diaryland or locked their blogs). How will they find me? I'll keep my Diaryland account, so I'll be able to check in to read their stuff, but to them I'll be a dead account. "Has not updated in over three months." The exchange will be lost, and it's that exchange that is the foundation of the blogging community. Wrapped in this is something about leaving, letting go. I've written about it before, especially when I left Milwaukee, but it's a perennial feature of modern life. All Saints' Cathedral, the community in which I was first formed in faith, won't be where I celebrate my first Eucharist. As years go on I'll hear less and less from them, until I visit some Sunday and know perhaps three people...because other people move on, too. So much of my childhood was leaving that I think it bred in me a thirst for stability. I certainly am a creature of habit, and I like my surroundings to be orderly and organized. I also take forever to leave the house (just ask Amy); I wonder if that's me wanting to be assured that I have everything I need for the journey and not wanting to leave things disrupted behind. I'm somehow always tied to home. Life, like the internet, is always moving forward to new things. A blog, by its nature, is about looking back. Blog = web-log...an internet record book of how we feel and think. We record our impressions, which would otherwise be fleeting, in a form that is at once immediate and also archival. Our past is available in one or two clicks, a reassuring link to who we were and from where we came. But it's not just a treasure box...without new entries a blog is just a web site, static and finished. This might be too much pondering for one form of media to sustain...maybe a blog is just a blog. From now on, you can find mine at www.aaronorear.com, which now points to a new location. The Road goes ever on and on |
