Again? What is up with this guy? Why on earth does his blog keep moving?

Well, because it seems like a good idea. Actually, even though the blog hasn't moved very far this time, and despite it still being built with RapidWeaver, this is probably the most significant change since I started blogging back in whenever-it-was. One of the things I've always done in the past is rebuild all of the old content because I wanted the blog to be as comprehensive as possible. So whenever I moved the blog everything needed to be taken along. But this time the principle motivation was the opposite: I wanted to start again from scratch—I really liked the idea of abandoning all the 'legacy' content and procedures that I've built up over the years. If I started from nothing, what would happen?

Take the photography, for instance. Although I was very pleased with the way it was integrated into the old blog, it wasn't really very efficient. The last photo post I made took about a month before I could be bothered to spend the time to sort it out. Finding a more efficient method—say, switching entirely to Flickr, as I'm planning to do now—would also entail going through all the old photos and organising them. But if I just draw a line between old blog and new blog, I can find a new solution and not worry about how that affects all of the earlier content.

One reason for the change taking place now is that, after ten years living in Jena, I (effectively) moved to Magdeburg to take up a position teaching at the university at the start of October. Bearing that in mind, I've backdated all the posts—and tweets—I've made since then. Appropriately enough, the first tweet I made back in October sums the whole thing up neatly.

A new leaf.
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Just found out that I passed my MA! I'm not sure how I did it, but I did.
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Tags: work

Willian Zinsser:

Nobody told all the new computer writers that the essence of writing is rewriting. Just because they’re writing fluently doesn’t mean they’re writing well.

That condition was first revealed with the arrival of the word processor. Two opposite things happened: good writers got better and bad writers got worse. Good writers welcomed the gift of being able to fuss endlessly with their sentences—pruning and revising and reshaping—without the drudgery of retyping. Bad writers became even more verbose because writing was suddenly so easy and their sentences looked so pretty on the screen. How could such beautiful sentences not be perfect?

Guilty as charged, I think.
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Tags: musing