something I said

A variety of factors have prompted me to create this blog. Several of them are about Wordpress, which has become easier to configure in ways that suit me. Features like being able to post via email, the ease of creating tags and categories, making backups, spam-filter and captcha functions that make it easier to permit comments, and the ability of my feed reader (Omea) to retrieve comments each add a bit of impetus. Add to that the number of local people using the same platform. The aggregate of factors makes me think it’s worth trying.

But those are not reason enough to start a whole bunch of new posts. So the final impetus came from a couple of other things. One is that I want more separation between the stuff I post for public consideration and the stuff I post for the benefit of friends; between materials I want to give higher and lower profiles. Examples of higher profile stuff include material about Highbury Trust and Eastside development, which deserve to be set amongst materials with a more serious tone, and which will be easier to organise using categories and tags. (I am undecided about material of a topical or incidental nature, which is nice to disseminate widely, but which is also unimportant. Perhaps categories will help separate that into a side stream. Even better would be a way of setting up multiple feeds, one for each category.)

The other impetus goes back a few years to the idea of a magazine-style website, and the search for ways to develop such a thing. I created my first website with something like that in mind, and chose the Drupal content management system for my domain website because it is powerfully versatile that way. The magazine idea requires a separation of function within a navigable framework. The best I can do now is cobble something together from various web resources like Zoto and Community Walk. I haven’t picked up the necessary skills to develop my ideas within one site and one platform. Familiarising myself with Wordpress may reveal ways of creating the structure I’m looking for.

Having made the decision and set this up, there’s the matter of giving it a name. Since this is not replacing Explorations in Representational Space, but sits alongside, it needs to be distinct in name as well as content. I’ve come up with something I said partly as a reminder that this is about public discourse, whereas EiRS is set out as a journal and scrapbook. Something I said is also a personal project; is both partial and imbalanced, yet, as the title suggests, is at least partly caught up in an awareness of potential effects; this is a place to be somewhat more circumspect than I would be elsewhere.