Tim Hardy

I frequently come across familiar names from my weblogging days on mailing lists or stumble across posts on weblogs I used to read while googling for information. It makes me happy to see this. Sometimes the web seems quite small, almost homely.

I had grown fed up with maintaining a weblog and it was a relief when I stopped. I found myself obsessing over traffic and worrying excessively about what I was posting. Since I stopped maintaining scratch this, I’ve experimented with private weblogs hidden from the wider internet by .htaccess files and in doing so have rediscovered the usefulness of a blog as a server-side annotated bookmarking system. (del.icio.us takes this idea to a new level with the addition of user-defined tags.)

Lazy journalists who earn a living droning out their opinions bore me. Op-Eds by unknown webloggers are no less irritating especially when they’re preaching to the choir about any of the thousand knee-jerk reactions the flesh is heir to, in particular when responding to the political fallout of the events of September 11 2001.

I hold strong political opinions but I’m not going to waste my time stroking the egos of those who share them in a link-loved-up political echo chamber. Nor am I going to declare comment war on those whose opinions offend me and troll up and down the internet sparking flames where I post. I don’t believe it changes anything for the better. I think it just hardens prejudices.

Action not words. Using the internet to share images of abuse of prisoners is a political action. Using the internet to expose hypocrisy from a public figure is action. Posting in sound and fury about “ragheads” or “fascists” or “bleeding heart liberals” is just a way of getting something off your chest that might better have been kept private and deleted once the mood has passed, just as a letter written in anger is best put aside for 24 hours to be reread before posting.

I’ve become fascinated by GNU/Linux which I’ve been using as a desktop operating system for the last two years. I love the community of support that has grown up as part of the open source movement and want, in my own modest way, to contribute to it. Keeping my linklog private means that google cannot slurp it up so if I post the results of my experiments with particular hardware or software, no one else can find it. It’s time to tear down that wall.

I’m going to start a public weblog again and it is going to be focussed on technical matters. No politics, no religion, no confessional posts. At times I’ll have to bite my tongue, at times I may slip a little in my aims but I will do my best to keep to this goal.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 1st, 2005 at 3:51 pm and is filed under Announcements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.