Musings

One thing I found was that this is harder than I thought it would be.

I was lucky to have chosen what, at the time, was (and, in many ways, still is) the best weblogging platform available for my purpose. Still, creating a system that could reliably take TeX-like input and produce well-formed XHTML+MathML output is much harder than I ever imagined¹. It took a long-running, concerted effort to beat the software into submission. A large fraction of my blog posts ended up devoted to documenting my efforts, so that someone wishing to replicate what I’ve done will not have to reinvent the wheel, the rack and the thumbscrew.

I’d naïvely hoped that, in the end, setting up a weblog like this one would be as simple as installing MovableType and adding a few plugins. Someday, maybe that will be the case, but we’re still far from that day².

The other thing that was harder than I’d expected was the actual physics-blogging part. Early on, I met a colleague at a conference, who said, “Hey, I’ve been reading your blog,” (the first person to own up to reading the damned thing), “but all you do is say stuff like, ‘I just read hep-th/yymmnnn. Looks pretty interesting.’” He was right, of course. If this project was to be worthwhile, I’d have to do better than ‘Looks pretty interesting.’ I would have, to use the Economists’ phrase, to “add value.” Adding value, however, takes thought, effort and, most of all, time. Time is not something I have a lot of, so I post much less frequently than I thought I was going to.

Perhaps, because it’s hard (in both of the above senses), only a trickle of physicists have taken the plunge and started their own blogs.

On the whole, though, I’m pleased with the over 500 posts that I have made, and the over 1500 comments they have accrued. I learned a lot and I gather, from the feedback I’ve gotten, so have many of my readers.

The quality of those comments have exceeded my wildest expectations. When I write about cosmic superstrings, Joe Polchinski and Koji Hashimoto chime in with explanations. When I write about using artificial diamonds as semiconductors, an expert on n-type doping (the hard case) comments. And, yes, when I write about some of the obscure (mis)feature of XML, none other than Tim Bray himself posts a comment.

So far, at least, USENET-style flame wars, trolls and crackpots have simply not been a problem. To the contrary, the comment threads on many of my posts are far more interesting and insightful than the posts themselves.

Comment (and Trackback) spam proved to be a bit of a challenge (and who can forget the crapflooders). But, so far, we seem to be winning the technological arms race with the spammers without hardly even trying.

Another unexpected side benefit of this little endeavour was that I’ve gotten to make the acquaintance of some of the top people in the Web Standards community. That’s been fun and educational, in ways I never expected 3 years ago. I don’t know about the Web as a whole, but this little corner of it has been immeasurably improved by their comments and insights.

All in all, it’s been a fun 3 years. It’ll be interesting to see where the next 3 years takes us.