Attachment to Complexity
December 5
Ran Prieur, one of my favorite online philosophers, has commented that he feels a need that's almost religious in nature to keep his site simple by hand coding all the html without the use of scripting languages or blogging tools. This is why his site has no reader comments, except those he occassionally chooses to paste in himself.
During my dance with Divine Madness -- the one that occurred in Fall of 2004 -- all updates to my abruptly relocated website were done in 100% raw html. My reasons had more to do with temporary technical limitations combined with an utterly frayed mind than anything so deliberately articulated as Ran's reasoning. But in it, I found a new level of freedom and excitement, a break from the stale rigity of page header templates and identical layouts day after day.
But in the months that followed, I realized something crucial (for me) was missing. I wanted user interaction back. I missed the randomness of Content Solutions, the depth of some of the threaded discussions, the immediacy of the "Others here recently" feature. I briefly attempted to forge an experiment in a wiki-esque design, but it was way too obtuse, nobody else did anything with it, and frankly, I didn't like using it much myself either.
Long story short: I eventually came up with a design that preserved (nearly) all the legacy features, added several new ones, and also included the ability to throw in a hand-coded html page (with a few script-generated navigation elements) every now and then if I felt like it.
Since then, I haven't used the raw html feature very often. Though there's something wonderous about the simplicity of working with raw html, ironically, in attempting to graft it onto my already bloated codebase and schema, it ended up creating yet another layer of complexity.
What now?
I am not Ran Prieur. My path is a different one. This may seem like a ridiculously obvious statement, especially when considering somebody I have never actually met in person. But in full seriousness, I don't think it would be an understatement to say that the course of my life over the past 1.5 years has been significantly altered as a result of randomly finding Ran's site that one night. This is due both to his own written insights, and the sources he referenced which allowed me to follow their many trails of wisdom. (Add sources they in turn referenced, and on and on.)
I am not Ran Prieur. As alluring as the idea may sometimes seem, I am not going to strip my site down to nothing but raw html, at least not right now. But I do think he was onto something when he wrote about the novel notion of gradually reducing complexity, rather than tearing it all down in a sudden outburst of anxiety, only to gradually build back up to the breaking point again. Maybe I could somehow do that with my site?
I'm not certain of anything right now, but I've got these thoughts swimming around in my head of a few steps that I might take. Easy things, like moving a bunch of the archives into a directory tree of static html files so I could get rid of some of that old database schema cruft. I could have it generate the files with uniform formatting cues to be easily parsable by a perl script, just in case I ever decided I wanted to load them back up and do automated stuff with them again later.
Then maybe I could make some subtle changes to the way the main index page's html is created. Though it would still have many dynamic elements where I really want them, the bulk of the page could be a fluidly editable canvas. That would be so sweet, if I could figure out a way to do it without turning it into a totally unmanagable pile of crap. Details pending.
For now, I will probably continue the same old same old for a while. These are just thoughts of where I might want to take it, assuming power to keep the computers running continues for a while longer. (Which I believe it will. It seems like a good bet that "food" (as our culture defines it) will become scarce before electricity does. But that's another discussion.)
So anyway... back to the usual scheduled programming...
