Tuesday, April 27, 2010

In a just few days, the ax will be dropped on FTP users, effectively ending a glorious era of old-fashioned blogging and heralding a more streamlined way of managing all this text. Initially I was indignant at the mandatory change. How dare Google alter their free service at will? The nerve! I pored over the comments from fellow FTP users, dour cries of a thousand frowny-face emoticons, and briefly considered joining the protest. Then it dawned on me that this would require participation in not just a community, but an online community, the prospect of which was even more offensive.

Let’s face it. Pointing Blogger to an FTP? That’s so 2003. I certainly felt clever when I got it to work, but it’s a royal pain in the ass to maintain: remember one password for the client, another for the hosting account. Don’t forget to renew. Hosting costs increased to what now? Ensure I’ve uploaded icons to the right folder. Check the HTML in my template for URLs pointing to nowhere in particular. Verify the flux capacitor needs new plutonium rods, and divert more power to the main generator, and oh holy shit don’t cut the blue wire.

This setup is a relic to be retired, rickety infrastructure that really has no place in modernity–it’s like discovering, in the age of iPhones, two rusty cans connected by a long piece of string. You try to multitouch that business, and tetanus will fuck you up. In preparation for the big move, I’ve had to delve into old posts, making sure all my links are pointing to places that make sense, and it’s been a trip, a real blast from the past. Honestly some of it makes me cringe, though I plan on preserving it for posterity. It’s almost like someone else wrote this stuff.

I can only conclude that Secondhand Rants has grown. And so have I, in a way. I’m sleeping far more reasonable hours these days. I’ve got a tighter handle on my finances. I’ll need to sign off in short order so I can ready a shirt, with an iron no less, in preparation for a business meeting tomorrow morning. At a coffee shop. Don’t entirely know why I scheduled it, but I’m going to go anyway. How and when did these changes happen? I’m not exactly sure, but in this shift–to become big people–I suspect I may be wholly complicit.