A few weeks ago I did a major redesign of this site, which finally integrated the wiki and the blog together in a unified interface.
The reason the wiki was moved from tatewake.com to here in the first place was because I had originally different plans for that domain when I bought it nearly ten years ago.
I thought I could possibly resurrect this idea– and it almost happened– but let me tell you the back story.
Although I considered it my personal site at the time, the original tatewake.com was much different, meant to be a zany, cultural type of e-magazine along the lines of a “word.com” (back in ‘99) or “seanbaby.com” and written entirely in HTML by hand.
Here’s a snapshot of what it used to look like:
This lasted for most of a year, and although it didn’t quite hit that mark, I had some good readership (mostly word of mouth) until I started posting my personal software projects to the site, at which point everything started going down hill.
Additionally, I stopped focusing on writing creative content for it, and hand-coding the pages for each article became an exercise in frustration.
Ironically it seems the same thing started happening again now, nearly ten years later. I tried making this site a magazine site, and integrated software directly on the site, and started losing focus on both blogging and software.
At first I wasn’t really making this connection– but something didn’t feel right though, and I think I’ve hit on a few points on why this concept didn’t work:
- Folks who normally came to the software section wouldn’t necessary read the blog or care to.
- The blog was just becoming a glorified form of the “what’s new in the wiki,” which was not the point at all.
- The most recent site design just didn’t feel right to me, and the layout wasn’t flowing as well as I’d liked.
- And finally, I don’t want to spend the majority of my time messing around with my own site; I got other creative stuffs I want to make.
I’m reminded of the Unix philosophy, “do one thing and do it well.”
And here I thought I was so smart; but I guess that’s what you get from an engineering mindset, trying to build the better mousetrap.
So, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m going to try to follow a more Unixy approach for the sites from here on forward.
This site will be “me” (blog) only, and much to my original chagrin, tatewake.com will become software only again.
Perhaps in the future I might investigate the magazine format for a new site again, as I think it would be an interesting idea, but we’ll see.
Good luck on redistributing content among your sites, Terrence. Which may be a reason this question is in bitterly wrong place, but – as the current tatewake layout is slightishly different than the previous one of tjgrant, is it because of any mods to the monobook template they both used?
Hmm, well tatewake is using just standard monobook again, like it used to be. The “newer” layout that I had since mid-may was something I coded from scratch, it wasn’t really a “code” derivative from monobook in that sense, though I did use the same stylesheet from monobook for convenience.