It's been a long, long time since I wrote on a personal blog - back in August 2001, in fact, when most people were still calling it a diary. (Okay, most people had no idea what anyone was talking about when it came to the Internet in general.)
Things have changed since then. I've blogged three theatre tours (Our Of Your Mind in 2003, An Extremely Memorable Emergency in 2004, and Impromime in 2005/2006). I've written a film/satire/random rubbish/Doctor Who blog, with James Lark, since late 2004, which now lives at Talk To Rex, also home to our adventures in film and print. Atom has arrived, which doesn't mean much to you, but makes my life an awful lot easier.
Back whenever it was (1999?) that I started putting my diary onto the web (before then it was on a telnet-based BBS called Monochrome), I wrote a series of Perl scripts to manage everything. There was a little header-and-payload file format, and Perl would run merrily over that, figuring out what was going on, then spit out all the calendar system, and the entry files themselves. (This was before I understood what the hell Dave Winer was talking about with RSS, and by the time I got it I'd stopped writing.) This lasted until the end of August 2001, after which I went to New York for a month to study film making, the world changed, I came back, got busy, got busier... and never really picked it back up again.
I can't guarantee I'll pick it up again properly now.
Of course, the Perl system just wouldn't do in this day and age. For a start, I haven't used the language seriously in years, so I have no idea how to do modern things in it, like, umm, opening a file, or reading in a load of XML, filtering out the bits I want, and rendering paged Atom archive files. So I'm now running a new set of code, in Python, which is heavily XML driven. In particular, this means that the source of each diary entry is actually Atom itself. No grungy hacking about for me, no sir. It's Atom with embedded XHTML right the way down.
This has presented some interesting challenges, most notably that I had to import about 1500 old entries into Atom, meaning I had to figure out how the original Perl scripts worked and replicate them all in Python. Right now I'm writing new entries by hand in Atom, but I might go back to the old source format, which is pretty neat for something I dreamed up on the spur of the moment while sitting in an office in Cirencester. Either way, it seems to all hang together.
So here we are again. I've taken the opportunity to redesign my site at the same time, and link to all the fun places you can find me on the web (look under Elsewhere, which is probably at the bottom right of your browser window). I've made a big effort to use semantic HTML properly, all that jazz, but no doubt not quite enough, so call out if something's wrong. I don't want to commit too much, and then disappoint anyone, so let's just say hello again now, and see what happens next.