my personal website

[chris raettig <chris@raettig.org>]

i considered closing my website down for good. i'm still considering
that. my argument is that i dont have the time right now to do justice
to my ideas. my extreme personality leads to somewhat of an 
all-or-nothing mentality. i dont like drifting along. the middle
of the road is not a safe place to be. (sitting on the fence
isn't very comfortable?)

for the last few weeks i have had a holding page in place because
i didn't want to sit and watch my site stagnate while i tried
to find the time it would take to make a decision. 

i chose the middle road for the time being. i think that the
resurgence of corpanthems and the large amount of traffic hitting
my holding page motivated me sufficiently to give the site a new
lick of paint and a revised content management system. hopefully
this new design will at least give me enough motivation to actually
keep posting. 

but the initial quandry remains. i'm *not* very good at middle
of the road. and i still dont have the time required to make
the site what i want it to be. which is a life online. i'm still
trying to decide whether to invest the energy and time it would
take to make it that, or whether to log off. nine years is a lot
of time to pour your life onto the network. 

i could see myself logging off completely and becoming a hermit. 
disappearing into the wilderness, and loving it. i think there
would be something quite liberating about that. i'm just not
sure i'm ready yet. i can still imagine me somehow finding
the time to complete this site. 

there are some real limiting factors to how deeply one can put
their life online. this is well trodden ground i'm not about
to redescribe. but it strikes me that the rat should not
be in charge of the experiment. there is no webcam inside my head,
and events are only here described using the rather blunt tool
of my writing style. i can imagine a few possible developments.

one of them is to find a qualified psychiatrist with whom i would
have a weekly session. they would then produce a report which
would be published on this site. i would make a commitment not
to edit or censor what they write, and they would only be bound
to protect the people my life touches. if anybody reading this
can help me find such a person, then please get in touch.


this redesign is the result of about twelve hours work, spread
over the course of a week. thanks to glish, terreus, derek and  martin
for their wise words and patient assistance during that time.
as you can see, simplicity is still my aesthetic interest. 
i'm inspired by josef muller-brockmann though css doesn't quite
offer enough flexibility to adhere strictly to a defined grid system.
interoperability and standards compliance are both still bees in
my bonnet. 

most of the twelve hours was spent working out how i wanted
to present the information. the backend code is my usual
ramshackle mix of standard open source tools, glued together
with perl and shell scripts, combined with code i had lying
around, and particularly a mysql database. mhonarc is still
used for handling email journal postings though it is
inflexible for dynamic sites. 

we are in the process of redeveloping the warm company site, with
a completely new version to go online in the next week or two. 
i have been working on these two sites in parallel which has
probably helped to keep me motivated and make sure they stayed
on track. 


i've been having an absolutely insanely busy couple of weeks. but
life is good. when i have the time to stop and take stock, i'll
write all about it. while its still fresh in my head i will
probably write something about corpanthems in the next 24 hours.