You may have noticed that I write a lot of words. I like writing. Whether I'm good at it is another debate. But I like it. The it-must-be-six-figures-by-now forum posts I've written over the years will attest to that, along with the three completed novels, the ongoing roleplay collaborative storytelling stuff and its associated wiki.
And with a bit of broken heart, I thought it might be neat to actually try running a forum again. Or, more accurately, a community where I can sit and build out resources of things I've collected about writing over the years. I get to stop hoarding stuff, I can sit down and actually organise it in a meaningful fashion, and I can put words to paper to sum up some of the things I've wanted to collect together.
For example, I have amassed quite the collection of writing tools. I mean, I could use Word but... I'd rather not, thanks. I have better choices. I have better choices that suit me, but there's value in my writing comparisons and reviews.
I have a name for it. I don't own the .com (the guy won't sell it to me) but I do the .net and .org, and I think I prefer the .net for this.
So... where to begin?
What are my requirements? Well, a forum software for one. Preferably something modern that I can customise (so, realistically, not Discourse because my Ruby isn't really up to that, nor do I care enough to get it there, writing stuff for Jekyll was annoying enough). A content solution would be nice but not required; I can build what I need.
I also know that some of the stuff I want to provide/collate doesn't fit cleanly into a CMS, and will require custom dev to be in any way useful. That's fine, but it does rule out platforms that aren't self hosted. (No great surprise; I can run my own server and do it cheaper, and the requirement for customisation plus the cost factor rules out the cloud offerings at this point in time)
My immediate thought goes to XF. The lack of content proposition puts me off but no matter, I start plotting out my plan. I am, if nothing else, a builder. Building out a CMS on XF doesn't strike me as particularly terrifying. Annoying, if anything. I'd even started writing my perfect XF CMS and then the great pissing match happened where I got moderated on XF's official site. I won't get into why, but it was hilarious in a sort of bleak gallows-humour way. But it put me off greatly.
You see, I'm not afraid of building things, I do it as a day job. But it didn't take much in the way of conversation with our good dear friend Tracy, plus the behaviour of XF.com, to completely cause me to rethink my plans. The post where I flat out said "XF Ltd is not a serious company" might have been over-egged but in the heat of the moment it was entirely how I felt. I'm calmer now and I might yet pick up XenFolio again but not today.
Now, I'd realised that part of my problem was the age-old 'perfect is the enemy of good'. That I need all the features in place before I start. That I couldn't possibly start just writing without having the site, the theme, the add-ons, the whole experience in place. Obviously. How dare I?
I am mindful that I am procrastinating. I am mindful why this is so. But I thought I'd try and overcome myself.
Next step... would Woltlab do what I wanted? I already had a licence for Woltlab forum + blog + gallery. So I installed it. Does it do what I want? Well, no.
So here's the problem I find myself with. The forum part it does admirably. Comfortably. No surprises there. But it's the content I'm having a problem with.
On the one hand there are streams of content that are clear and unambiguous in their editorial tone. I want to offer reviews for writing apps and tools, reviews and thoughts on books about writing, resources about writing and thoughts about writing.
Woltlab presents me with 'blogs' and 'articles', for which the latter can safely be squirrelled away into categories. I could see the resources grouped nicely that way - but there's no taxonomic world where the reviews are the same as articles. More importantly what I really want is to be able to tag custom fields onto the reviews, and different ones. App reviews need whether it's free / one-time payment / subscription based, and what platform(s) it's available for. Filtering on these is basically essential.
Which means Woltlab isn't my tool of choice; this gap is more problematic. Now, the question is 'if I'd already been reconciled to writing an entire CMS for XF, why not do it here' but the answer is simple: this feels more like swimming upstream than the relative clean slate of XF. WBB already has some content management, I'd be weaving in and out of that.
So... what next? Well, as I see it I have two choices. I can either bust out my Invision licence and build it out on there, or I can go real crazy and build it out on WordPress. No, for real.
WordPress actually appeals to me; I build WP sites as a day job, so setting up the different streams of content I want to offer as post types, get in FacetWP to do nice filtering (dare I say it, nicer than Invision in practice), and whatever lines between resources and blog posts I can handwave away at my leisure. That's a pure categorisation problem at that point because I'm not dealing with 'this is a blog and NOT an article'.
The same question comes up for Invision, though. So what do I mean about the blur between 'is it a blog or is it an article/resource'. Well, some resources are clearly resources, but something like talking about "the death of the author" and how that interrelates to how modern authors are infinitely accessible online and how this works with the desire/need to reframe works narratively is definitely on the fence. Could even go into both; on the one hand, it could be used as an article on it happening and to observe it happening and frame it around authors' media presence, or it could easily be an op-ed piece on it happening and what I think about it, which is a highly different point of view on the same thing.
I am right now experimenting with Invision 5 beta to get a feel for what it does and doesn't give me, and how much customisation I get out of the box and what I can do without writing much code (e.g. styling Database Templates in Pages), but I can't shake the question about 'but what about self hosting'. I have, as I mentioned earlier, resources to add that don't fit a CMS model; some of these are interactive resources, fitting this in will naturally require development. But if I end up having to go to cloud, I will have to rethink the entirety of this outcome, and that feels more drastic to me in an Invision world than an XF or Woltlab or WP one - even though I am entirely aware that in practice I have precisely no guarantees about the future presence of any of them.
Invision is winning but I am mindful I need to solve this situation and I need to find a theme that suits; the default theme is acceptable, but it's not a long term solution. But we shall see - until next time.
And with a bit of broken heart, I thought it might be neat to actually try running a forum again. Or, more accurately, a community where I can sit and build out resources of things I've collected about writing over the years. I get to stop hoarding stuff, I can sit down and actually organise it in a meaningful fashion, and I can put words to paper to sum up some of the things I've wanted to collect together.
For example, I have amassed quite the collection of writing tools. I mean, I could use Word but... I'd rather not, thanks. I have better choices. I have better choices that suit me, but there's value in my writing comparisons and reviews.
I have a name for it. I don't own the .com (the guy won't sell it to me) but I do the .net and .org, and I think I prefer the .net for this.
So... where to begin?
What are my requirements? Well, a forum software for one. Preferably something modern that I can customise (so, realistically, not Discourse because my Ruby isn't really up to that, nor do I care enough to get it there, writing stuff for Jekyll was annoying enough). A content solution would be nice but not required; I can build what I need.
I also know that some of the stuff I want to provide/collate doesn't fit cleanly into a CMS, and will require custom dev to be in any way useful. That's fine, but it does rule out platforms that aren't self hosted. (No great surprise; I can run my own server and do it cheaper, and the requirement for customisation plus the cost factor rules out the cloud offerings at this point in time)
My immediate thought goes to XF. The lack of content proposition puts me off but no matter, I start plotting out my plan. I am, if nothing else, a builder. Building out a CMS on XF doesn't strike me as particularly terrifying. Annoying, if anything. I'd even started writing my perfect XF CMS and then the great pissing match happened where I got moderated on XF's official site. I won't get into why, but it was hilarious in a sort of bleak gallows-humour way. But it put me off greatly.
You see, I'm not afraid of building things, I do it as a day job. But it didn't take much in the way of conversation with our good dear friend Tracy, plus the behaviour of XF.com, to completely cause me to rethink my plans. The post where I flat out said "XF Ltd is not a serious company" might have been over-egged but in the heat of the moment it was entirely how I felt. I'm calmer now and I might yet pick up XenFolio again but not today.
Now, I'd realised that part of my problem was the age-old 'perfect is the enemy of good'. That I need all the features in place before I start. That I couldn't possibly start just writing without having the site, the theme, the add-ons, the whole experience in place. Obviously. How dare I?
I am mindful that I am procrastinating. I am mindful why this is so. But I thought I'd try and overcome myself.
Next step... would Woltlab do what I wanted? I already had a licence for Woltlab forum + blog + gallery. So I installed it. Does it do what I want? Well, no.
So here's the problem I find myself with. The forum part it does admirably. Comfortably. No surprises there. But it's the content I'm having a problem with.
On the one hand there are streams of content that are clear and unambiguous in their editorial tone. I want to offer reviews for writing apps and tools, reviews and thoughts on books about writing, resources about writing and thoughts about writing.
Woltlab presents me with 'blogs' and 'articles', for which the latter can safely be squirrelled away into categories. I could see the resources grouped nicely that way - but there's no taxonomic world where the reviews are the same as articles. More importantly what I really want is to be able to tag custom fields onto the reviews, and different ones. App reviews need whether it's free / one-time payment / subscription based, and what platform(s) it's available for. Filtering on these is basically essential.
Which means Woltlab isn't my tool of choice; this gap is more problematic. Now, the question is 'if I'd already been reconciled to writing an entire CMS for XF, why not do it here' but the answer is simple: this feels more like swimming upstream than the relative clean slate of XF. WBB already has some content management, I'd be weaving in and out of that.
So... what next? Well, as I see it I have two choices. I can either bust out my Invision licence and build it out on there, or I can go real crazy and build it out on WordPress. No, for real.
WordPress actually appeals to me; I build WP sites as a day job, so setting up the different streams of content I want to offer as post types, get in FacetWP to do nice filtering (dare I say it, nicer than Invision in practice), and whatever lines between resources and blog posts I can handwave away at my leisure. That's a pure categorisation problem at that point because I'm not dealing with 'this is a blog and NOT an article'.
The same question comes up for Invision, though. So what do I mean about the blur between 'is it a blog or is it an article/resource'. Well, some resources are clearly resources, but something like talking about "the death of the author" and how that interrelates to how modern authors are infinitely accessible online and how this works with the desire/need to reframe works narratively is definitely on the fence. Could even go into both; on the one hand, it could be used as an article on it happening and to observe it happening and frame it around authors' media presence, or it could easily be an op-ed piece on it happening and what I think about it, which is a highly different point of view on the same thing.
I am right now experimenting with Invision 5 beta to get a feel for what it does and doesn't give me, and how much customisation I get out of the box and what I can do without writing much code (e.g. styling Database Templates in Pages), but I can't shake the question about 'but what about self hosting'. I have, as I mentioned earlier, resources to add that don't fit a CMS model; some of these are interactive resources, fitting this in will naturally require development. But if I end up having to go to cloud, I will have to rethink the entirety of this outcome, and that feels more drastic to me in an Invision world than an XF or Woltlab or WP one - even though I am entirely aware that in practice I have precisely no guarantees about the future presence of any of them.
Invision is winning but I am mindful I need to solve this situation and I need to find a theme that suits; the default theme is acceptable, but it's not a long term solution. But we shall see - until next time.
