I'm forever behind reading blogs. I have a news reader, and I read things when I get around too it. It always takes me a few weeks after the end of a semester to get caught up with the world wide web, though. So I'm just now getting around to reading peoples "Reflect on the Old Year, Welcome in the New Year posts. You know what I'm talking about, everyone is doing it. I on the other hand, wrote my first post of the new year about how I accidentally clicked no, rather than yes, and lost all of my 60 million open tabs.
Wow, folks. That's what keeps you coming back, I can tell. Better late than never, here's what I'm thinking about TealArt these days. It's experimental media and methods after all, so I can get a little meta here.
TealArt has never been a typical blog.
It is not, nor has it ever really been a one man show, but it's clear that I'm pulling a lot of strings behind the scenes. We play the 'brand' aspect of TealArt, but the name carries virtually no meaning. We don't have a clearly (or not so clearly) articulated purpose, and while there are sure as hell people reading this (I have logs and interactions to prove it), we don't have active comment-discussions. We use the blogging template, software, and so forth but there are huge spans where, if we post every week, let alone day, it's a lot. And this isn't exactly a hotbed of new and exciting links: we practice a kind of blogging which is more on the side of online-journal, and less on the side of link-blog.
But what form will this website take next year and in the following years? Frankly I don't think that much is going to change, I'm not going to sudenly have tons of time to write TealArt entries, TA will always have more than one voice, TA will continue to use the blog format. TealArt will always be subject to the ebb and flow of my/our interests. Taken as a whole, TealArt traces a personal linages, so I think that this is completely fitting way to proceed.
I suppose, other than a very minor face lift, which was well over due (we'd been using a variation of the same design for the past.... 2.5 years.), the biggest change to TealArt is the creation of separate sub-sites. For knitting, the identity project, and studies. There's nothing that these sites offer which can't be had through the TeaArt Main Page, but it provides an appropriate entry-point (which lets me more adeptly drop links, in the right place, join webrings etc.) At some point in the near future, I'm going to have to come up with RSS feeds for each of these entry points, but I'm in denial about it for the moment.
This organization also lets me partition the way I/we write for TealArt, without changing much, or over extending our infrastructure. It's still all powered by a single 5 meg mySQL database, which frankly could probably be slimmed down to a 3.5-4 meg (we have a lot of legacy type stuff in there at the moment).
We'll just have to see how it goes.
cheers, sam