Fascination Place

The day has finally arrived: This evening I launched my new journal, Fascination Place.

Sadly, this does spell the end for this journal, Gazing Into The Abyss, after a nine-year run. As my introductory post at FP says, I've wanted to move to modern blogging software for a while, and get my own domain name, and - honestly - come up with a different name for my journal. So I'm making the big break.

Readying FP has consumed much of my spare time for the month of September: Learning CSS and PHP, figuring out how WordPress works, designing the template, deciding which third-party plug-ins I wanted to use, configuring the template to play nice with them... and that's without writing any actual content! But as the quote I have at the bottom of my home page states, the Web is all about the content. It can look pretty, but that shouldn't get in the way of saying what you want to say.

So other than any glitches which turn up, I'm past the configuration stage and now I can to start writing stuff! Yay!

I hope you'll all follow me over there.

I will probably post a couple more things here before I turn out the lights: An entry of "best of" links, probably some data on the historical traffic which GitA has received, but nothing terribly exciting. But if you want to be here 'til the bitter end, keep the RSS feed in your aggregator, or check back over the next month.

It's a sad event, but also a happy one, too.

It's funny, I'm thinking how sitting here now feels very similar to how I was sitting back when I posted my first entry: It's night time, and I'm even sitting at the same desk. (I keep meaning to buy a new desk, and keep dragging my feet. I've had this one for over 13 years, since I was in grad school.) I've been preparing for days (weeks, this time), and I'm nervous about the launch.

On the other hand, I now live 2000 miles away from where I did nine years ago, I live with my girlfriend and with four cats rather than two. I'm writing this using Xcode on a Power Mac G5, whereas back then I was using BBEdit on a Power Computing Mac-compatible. I don't even remember what I used to create the original graphics, but these days I'm using Macromedia Fireworks MX 2004. (Yes, still a release behind, as usual.) This shouldn't be confused with any actual aptitude for creating Web graphics on my part! Sometimes I think I should just hire Trish to do all my graphics for me!

The only constant is change. Here's to another one.