Another Reorganisation

To every idea there is a season, though some ideas seem to have purpose only under faulty assumptions. In April I decided to rethink how I went about my “informal” writing, which had previously been highly intermittent, rather formal, and interminably long. In When is a Blog a Blog? I renamed my old blog to “essays” and aimed for more frequent, less formal, shorter updates in this blog.

After 4 months it’s time to evaluate how this split is working. I have managed rather more frequent updates, in a less formal style, and they are shorter in length. But – and this is perhaps unsurprising for someone who a school report once pinpointed as prone to “prolixity” [1] – I’d hardly call many of my recent posts short in an absolute sense. Now I’ve met the new boss, I realise that he acts rather similarly to the old boss.

I have thus been forced to acknowledge that it makes little sense to divide my writing into separate “blogs” and “essays”. There is more that unites my writing, for better and worse, than divides it. I have therefore merged all my old “essays” back into my blog. Suddenly my blog archive has grown from 18 entries to 74. At some point I intend creating a separate list of what I consider the posts which are most likely to be of longer-term interest, because there is now a definite divide between more substantial and ephemeral posts.

With luck this merge has been done in a way that rewrites all old links to the right content. I automated parts of the migration (including generating most of the rewrite rules), because splitting old posts up by year was a tedious job, but I had to do some parts by hand. Even with my long-standing rewrite test suite (which checks that URLs are rewritten to the correct target) I’m bound to have made multiple mistakes. If you spot links that don’t work as expected, please send me an email, and I’ll fix things as soon as I can.

And I promise that I will make no further reorganisations — until the next one.

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