Aggregation

Only rarely do I get aggregated. Sometimes I get the point, but I fear it’s at the top of my head.

One of these days I’ll work on my Movable Type templates. I’d like to switch for several reasons. Most of them have to do with accessibility. But then it means that I’ll have to be more careful with my code and such. I never really thought I’d have much of an audience for playing in my sandbox. Writing is how I stretch; being able to use pictures and hyperlinks is just plain fun— I find that I can compose in a form that really suits my peculiar frames of mind. But I’m not sure it’s worth the aggregation.

I don’t know much about RSS, but I fear it. Part of what really makes blogging special for me is it’s sexual appeal. I suppose that makes me like Golby. Having long experience with the listserv world, I prefer playing with myself (and occasionally with others) to my hearts content here, compared to diving into a textual orgy. It’s my body of work, and I’m not selling it to anyone. Uh, that just seems dirty. Writing snappy pick-up lines for the club, hoping that someone might follow me home. Nope, I just don’t feel the need for the aggregation.

There are all sorts of rules. Content management software is a labor saving device which imposes a structure on things. Distribution software offers more labor saving, but the attendant structures seem more limiting than liberating. Like a referee at an orgy, it seems a wholly superfluous invention. Accessibility is a different issue though; I tried to keep up with it for a while because it seemed, well, democratic.

Oh, that’s right. I had a point. I think self-imposed rules are good. I remember one of the most liberating things in photography I tried was to imposing a structure of randomness. A structure of randomness? Yes, there is such a thing. One of my primary uses for my toy-computer in the dark-ages was generating random map coordinates which I forced myself to photograph. Forcing myself to use the same structure for two posts in a row was also fun. Though I don’t think I’ll ever go so far as scheduling posts, I can get behind the idea. Some structures help. Others don't.