I‘m at a crossroads right now, with regard to my blog: I sort of feel like I’m living in a hotel here in exile, and I’m doing whatever I can
to help the hotel feel more like home while my real house is rebuilt, but the longer I stay here,
and the more I try to make it feel home, the more likely it is that it will
become home. I even tried to import the old WWdN entries to this blog, but (big surprise) the import failed. I wonder if I am doomed to have my archives in a useless textfile on my machine in my office until I eventually just suck it up and pay someone to fix the stupid fucking thing.

If I sound frustrated, it’s because I am.

I spent several hours the other day working on WWdN. With absolutely no progress to show for it when I was done, I was so pissed I slammed some drawers, kicked some things, and realized that I don’t give a flying fuck about the technology any more. I just want to write. Yes, it’s nice to have the "I did it myself" merit badge, but trying to do it all myself is eating up time I would rather spend on other things, and is rapidly sucking the life (and enthusiasm) out of me. When I started with blogger and geocities way back a thousand years ago, I loved that the technology made it easy for me to scrape things out of my brain and moosh them up on The Internets. Then I got into the technology and had a good time scooping my brains out, and manipulating the technology to make the stuff I scooped out look a little better. But now, I just want it to work.  It’s the writing that I care about, and time I spend waste dealing with technical bullshit is time that I can’t spend creating things that matter.

Yes, Virginia, I am starting to hate computers.

So I’m working with a friend of mine to completely rebuild WWdN from the ground up. We’re still puzzling out the final design, but it’s going to be very cool (and very different from the current layout) when it’s done. I’m conflicted about sticking with TypePad (and domain mapping) or banging on MT 3.2 until it has the same functionality as TypePad. Right now, I’m leaning toward domain mapping, even though TypePad is having what appears to be the worst technical difficulties in its history (Six Apart has assured TypePad users that these problems are about to go away. I see no reason to doubt that, but it’s still annoying in the mean time, and is the best argument so far to stay with my own installation at WWdN.)

I don’t know what I’ll ultimately end up doing, but it’s clear that I’ll be in exile for much longer than I originally anticipated.

I’ve changed the feedburner feed to reflect the WWd:iX xml file, rather than the WWdN xml file. If you’re subscribed through feedburner, WWdN:In Exile should start showing up in your RSS reader pretty soon, and we’ll all feel . . . at home.