Consolidating My Web Empire

I am consolidating my web empire of seven blogs, a tumblelog, and an old website on Dot Mac. I have replaced the latter with a personal wiki. That was the first step. Next I will begin migrating the most useful information from posts on the three blogs that I am discontinuing, History Survey, History Survey Links, and On My Mac.

I am taking these steps for a couple reasons. First, I cannot update so many blogs regularly. Second, these three blogs use content that is not especially time-sensitive and that does not necessarily benefit from a linear and chronological layout. Indeed, I would like to be able to update the material in these blogs as well as establish more links among different pieces of it. It seems to me that a wiki is more suitable for this task. At the same time, it can decrease the pressure to post regularly when there might not be anything to post. (For a helpful point-by-point comparison of these two genres, see WikiAndBlog.)

I made the wiki on my Mac with VoodooPad, and then I exported it to HTML. It was pretty darn easy once I got the hang of it. I just had to add some code to the template in the export plugin for copyright date, date updated, and GoogleAnalytics. It was easy to find the variables I needed in the VoodooPad wiki. I also had to iron out a few places where bullet points introduced an extra space here and there. Instead of going into the HTML, however, I used the backspace and return keys within the VoodooPad document itself.

I suppose I could also play with the template’s layout and the CSS, but I’m not feeling quite that ambitious. I was looking for easy, and that’s what I got.