The final return to first intentions with Wyrmis.net

(23:01:12 CST)

The final return to first intentions with Wyrmis.net

Wyrmis.net was started in something like late 2002, maybe early 2003. Prior to The Summer of Hell, anyhow. It was called, I think, "Doug's Webpage of Doug", which was meant to be a contrast to the original version, which surfaced in the late 90s, as Doug's RPG Page. That would have been on Geocities, and was where Ghostlight first surfaced. After I had backed away, some, from RPGs as a hobby, I wanted a more general page, and so when it was finally, after a few false-starts, restarted; it became Doug's Webpage of Doug. I do not remember, frankly, if Wyrmis.net ever had that title, or if that was back in the Geocities days, but I am fairly sure that the DWD continued until my own hosting.

One of the first and original plans for the website was to have a blog, much like Dickens of a Blog, and then to make posts related to the general topics of the website, which would then get integrated (some of them, anyhow) into the other pages. It was a best-of-both-worlds sort of arrangement. I got the off-the-cuff and on-the-fly posting that a blog offers; on top of having the more structured and editable style of a more permanent webpage. By the way, to be clear, I did actually create the proto-blog and hosted it. It was called something like "Doug's Blog", and did not have all of the personality or erudition that I try and stack into the current form, but it still did have some long and reasonable rants and essays into things. I never, though, worked out a way to feasibly enact the "blog that turns into a webpage" design.

During a computer change-over, by the way, the entire contents of this early blog were lost. This kind of saddens me, but only because of about four or five posts that I really wish I had backed up.

Somewhere along the way, after I stopped running my own website for a year or so, I had my Livejournal and I also had a blogspot blog called Doug's Tea Blog. As the name suggests, when I first started it, I only blogged about tea. Later, after I tossed in some discussions of books and pipes; the "Tea Blog" no longer cut it as a name and so I changed it, sort of at a whim, to "Dickens of a Blog". This was a pun on the name as well as my statement that I blogged about the sort of things that Dickens wrote about. When Wyrmis.com replaced Wyrmis.net (I didn't have the money to renew the URL right away, and by the time I did, they wanted me to bid to get it back); there was the idea to build a blog into it almost immediately; but I did not at first. It wasn't until March 19, 2008 that I made the move back to my own domain (during the interim of a couple/three years, here, I was using the aforementioned other two blogs). I did not port the name over for a few weeks or so.

Now that my livejournal content and my tea/pipe/book blog were recombined, and the name Dickens of a Blog was fully in place; I had another chance to start back up my "post to the blog and then link from the main pages" idea. Again, though, it never surfaced. Partially it was because of my blog's then more primitive nature. Each month was a long collection of posts with the most recent ones copied and pasted over into a main page of sorts. I could either copy and paste some entries over into new HTML pages; or I could link to whole month's worth of entries. It was not until May of this year that I reworked the scripts behind the blog so that the posting generated separate days, each, and it was possible to change to my original plan. I did on a few posts, test runs, and it worked. I just did not keep it up. I could not tell you why, outside of laziness.

Today, though, I spent 2-3 hours sorting through the first two or three months and linking and cross-linking those old articles; and Sunday I am going to spend another 2-3 hours going through some more, and probably Monday as well. I am also going to rewrite the menu bar over to the left slightly (though not on every page, just on most of the key pages) and the upshot will that every page, or just about every page, will have double or triple or even quadruple the content and people who browse my blog will be able to use the old layout as a metric to find things. They can still use the blog archives if they want, or they can go over to, say, "on Linux and Webdesign", and browse there. I think I'll like this combination. It's what I wanted to begin with, and I think it will work out for me.

Si Vales, Valeo

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