In my Ideas of March post I said I had about 20 drafts, but on checking it seems I was underestimating; I have 26, the oldest being from April 11 2008, almost three years old. Why do so many of the posts I start end up sitting there unpublished? At the suggestion of andyc, I'm trying to see if there's a pattern or patterns.

Most of the drafts are simply a heading with a few jotted thoughts hinting what the post was going to be about. Some are about technical topics, some are about my experience as a user and observer of the Web and web software, and others are completely non-technical. So these are my unfinished posts, from most recent to oldest.

Lithium and continuous integration

Describing how to set up continuous integration for Lithium applications, using the junit plugin I wrote. Our work set up is pretty specific, so I wanted to whittle this down to something more generic, with wider applicability. Requires commitment.

The Farm

We disappear to the farm on a regular basis, and it's where I'm writing this post from. I wanted to include photos and I don't have a good photo-oriented workflow.

From Firefox to Chrome

When I switched to Chrome, I planned the obligatory switch post; what I like and what I miss.

Web framework routing

A discussion of the different routing philosophies employed by web frameworks. Lots of research required.

On PhD supervision

So many research candidates talk about problems with their supervisors, and I wanted to talk about how awesome mine have been. But I got bored talking about my PhD.

The spawn of PageRank

PageRank has been hugely influential, and when researchers come up with anything to do with graph traversal they tend to call it BlahRank. Lost interest.

Scott Leslie: What is the most “successful” “formal” “OER” project?

No idea. I started with a quote from Scott Leslie and then said, "When I started my PhD, I wanted to ..." what? Not do my PhD?

Uvumi: low sound, rumbling noise, murmur, or hum

My ongoing search for a decent music discovery service. I was hopeful about Uvumi but gave up on it, for a variety of reasons. Unlike other services I tried, these were actually nice folk, and I decided I didn't want to say anything bad about them.

An android or an apple

I'm due for a new phone, and a smartphone of some kind is the obvious choice for me. I want to support Android an iPhone is likely to Just Work.

The philosophy of Habari at LUV

I gave a talk about Habari at Linux Users Victoria. I was going to write it up and link to the video, when they published it, but the video was never released.

Time for some respect, for asylum seekers, for the Australian public

I'm disgusted by the amount of misinformation spread about asylum seekers who come to Australia by boat, the overwhelming majority of whom are found to be genuine refugees. I had a link to some sobering statistics from Amnesty International, but the link is dead now.

Searching for Just Right HTML and CSS editors Part One

Rachel was looking at learning HTML and CSS, and I was going to evaluate a variety of tools for her. Part One was going to be a description of needs, and Part Two was going to be the evaluation. She lost interest, and therefore so did I.

Simple gallery plugin for Habari

A description of a plugin I wrote for Habari, but I wanted to improve the plugin before I wrote about it, and just never got around to it.

Weka in JRuby

For my PhD, I used the Weka Machine Learning Toolkit, but to avoid writing any Java I ran it on JRuby. To help others do the same thing, I was going to translate the Java tutorial to JRuby, pointing out a couple of issues that tripped me up. But again, I got bored of my PhD.

Publishing with Habari

I think this was another go at writing up the LUV talk.

Encouraging Flow

This seems to be a copy and paste of a Tim Bray post to which I was going to add my own flow tips. Seems I only came up with "don't wear shoes" before giving up. I must have been in the flow.

Talking to famous people

I bought Mark Dapin's book, Strange Country, and I wanted to send him a notice or tweet saying, "I bought your book today. It has very large print," but he didn't have a microblogging account. Pithy stuff, can't imagine why I didn't finish that one.

Australia's 'Clean Feed' is bad policy

Ugh. A rant about Stephen Conroy's misguided clean feed push. Technically bad, economically bad, and bad social policy. I wanted to add to the debate, which meant linking to lots of sources, and I ran out of steam.

Setting up a new Mac

When we got burgled, I lost my MacBook Pro, and this was to record all the things I do in setting up a new machine. I kept finding new things I needed to set up and install, and then the post got stale.

Subversion and Trac on a slice Part I

I gave up on setting up Trac on the slice.

Developers benefit from open source

I only have the title, but I think this was going to be a discussion about how good working on open source projects is for developers.

Most tags suck

An embryonic rant about the suckiness of most tagging interfaces.

Standardisation == death of innovation

Some bloke who was building some service that never launched was claiming that because there hasn't been much innovation in the realm of email, standardisation is inherently bad. I think he's full of crap. This was going to be a wide-ranging post in which I interviewed Important Folks on the Web about the benefits and risks of standardisation. Too much work for me at the time.

Twitter has accomplished crowd search, except they haven't

A couple of years ago there was all this buzz about Twitter being the solution to real time search. I was calling bullshit on behalf of all those thousands of users with virtually no followers (for instance, me).

Testing thumbshots

Another post inspired by andyc, this time about implementing a thumbshot view of blog archives. I might have written it if I'd actually done that implementation.

The Web as helpdesk

Musing about organisations that actually engage on the Web, to the benefit of their customers or users. I got bored.

So I don't finish posts when they sit too long, or when I get bored, or when they require lots of background work, and the world is probably a better place for the lack. At some point, I'll get around to writing the more recent posts, I hope, but for now I should just go and delete a bunch of drafts.

Chris Shiflett laments the demise of blogging, placing the blame mostly on Twitter, because throwing out 140 character remarks is so much easier than sitting down and crafting a blog post.

I've blogged less in the last year as well, but I can't blame Twitter or Identica, my microblogging platform of choice. I'm going to blame the slightly younger and less grey me who decided that doing a PhD was a good idea, or at least an idea from which I shouldn't run screaming. The further I got into writing the big essay, the less creative I felt, and my writing on this blog almost completely stopped.

The timing of Chris' #ideasofmarch call to keyboards coincides with my desire to re-engage writing. I've got about 20 draft posts lying around, and while I'm not going to make a pledge, I would like to actually finish some of those.

I like blogging because I'm contributing to my space on the internet, because writing blog posts allows me to clarify my thoughts and to practice writing, and because helping to write the software running this site lets me poke around in the wonderful and fascinating wide world of the web.

<rickc> when i used wp a lot i used a remote client most of the time. since i'm usually in habari now, i've discovered the reason was i don't like the wp interface. <rickc> i've even written in my local habari install, then cut and pasted to my wp blog. :)

Things have been incredibly busy and stressful at chez nous recently. The beloved is acting in a senior role for a couple of months, which basically means she's doing two jobs, I'm trying to get some serious work done on my PhD so I can submit before the end of the year (a little late, but not outrageous), we're looking at interstate business opportunities, considering getting some work done on our house (it really needs it), I'm trying to continue to contribute to Habari, and there are all those other little bits and pieces of life that seem to take up so much time, some good some bad. Oh, and going to French class once a week. The long and the short of it is that I haven't had much time or brain space for blogging for a couple of weeks.

I try to average a post every two days, 15 posts a month. Most of the time I make it somewhere near that, but I won't this month unless some really exciting things happen in the next day that I really have to blog. So the question I have for you today is, if things are hectic and there isn't much blogging happening, but the blog isn't headed for the deadpool any time soon, should bloggers tell their readers (or reader) that it's temporary? Are you as a reader just going to be annoyed at a content-free post clogging up your newsreader, or do you like to hear this stuff from the people you read? Does it depend on who they are? Is a one-liner along the lines of, "Madness in the house (not the band), having a blogging break for a couple of weeks," worthwhile? How many questions at the end of a blog post is overkill? Oh, that's another topic ....

My new buddy Andy C recently said to me:

I used to enjoy blogging a lot more and I actually have a couple of humourous blog articles that I am genuinely quite fond - no more than that - proud of.

Twitter is just the ultimate in 'disposable' blogging. All that crap posted from Heathrow T5 just fills my time in. It's hardly earth shattering, is it? God - I can't remember any of those stupid tweets (apart from the lads in Yellow Lurex suits that was pretty funny) let alone be proud of all those throwaway one-liners.

But Twitter (or at least micro services like it, as on Andy's advice I'm trying out FriendFeed) is much more than that. The things I know about Andy have mostly come from that disposable blogging. It's exactly that reason that I think there is room for blogging and Twitter; blogging enables all sorts of complex ideas to be thrashed out, and I can get a real idea of what someone thinks, but through tweets I get to know the person. Of course there's a bit of a blurring between those two as well, but individual tweets don't have to be things of which to be proud. The body of tweets is indicative.

Over on wordpress.com,

... everyone’s free upload space has been increased 60x from 50mb to 3,000mb.

• Free Space to Three Gigabytes « WordPress.com

I can't help but feel that this is a step in the wrong direction for a blogging platform. The assumption is that you're using your blog to manage your media. I would only need that much space because there's no easy way to access the media in the places where I've already got it hosted. If I already use Flickr for my images, if I already use Viddler for my videos, why do I want to manage those media separately with my blog? [Yes, I chose to illustrate my point with the only two media silos implemented so far for Habari. It's only because I'm biased.]

Other than that, I'm sure it will make a lot of people happy.

After mucking around with Habari for the last few months, including porting the Connections theme, and loving the community, I'm now posting from my brand new, shiny Habari installation.

I'm sure there will be some fine-tuning of the theme over the next month or so, to move it from alpha to beta. There are a few issues I know about already, like incomplete support for multiple entries, and there may be other things I don't know about. If you find anything, please let me know.

Thanks to all the Habari community for helping me migrate.

Thanks to concise advice from Owen Winkler (aka ringmaster), my test Habari install now has the same URLs as my existing WordPress blog. That means that when I move, all my links will still work. It would have been a pain to redo all my internal links, but those three sites out there in the wild web that link to me are really valuable ...

For reference (lines wrapped for clarity):

INSERT INTO habari__rewrite<em>rules
    (name, parse</em>regex, build<em>str, handler, action,
     priority, is</em>active, rule<em>class, description)
VALUES ('display</em>entry',
    '%(?P<year>&#92;d{4})/
       (?P<mon0>&#92;d{2})/
       (?P<mday0>&#92;d{2})/
       (?P<slug>[^/]+)[/]{0,1}$%i',
       '{$year}/{$mon0}/{$mday0}/{$slug}',
       'UserThemeHandler', 'display_post', '8', '1', '0', '');

[Update: Don't copy and past the query above, you'll get spaces in your regex that break it. Use this text version instead. Also, make sure you change the table name to the correct prefix, habari__ is the default and most likely.]

When travelling, I keep a journal. I've been doing this for almost eight years now, with varying degrees of commitment, and have filled a couple of moleskines. This last trip to Iran is the first trip I've done since I started blogging and using Twitter, but I realised that I've been doing both for years, albeit low tech paper based blogging and tweets. Typically I'll have a couple of entries like, "Mannequins are freaky enough but someone got an import deal in Iran for extra freaky mannequins" and "Found veggie soups!" and then a longer entry about somewhere we've visited or what we've done for the day.

So - and I suspect isn't just me - my blog and Twitter are fulfilling specific and different writing needs, needs that I've had for a long time. I wonder if the people behind Twitter were conscious of this, or was it just a random lark?