Dear friend and reader,

This site and weblog in its current form really doesn't suit my purposes anymore. I had the smallest pang of regret that I came to this conclusion tonight, but it's been a long time in coming and difficult to deny the inevitability of this.

I constantly fight a battle of holding on to my information in a centralized place that I own and control, and interacting with all the social networks by putting my words and images into common spaces run by others. This site and my photo gallery have been the product of that need for control.

You are reading these words via what is basically the same software I wrote back in 1999, and while it's served me well and without any complaints over the last ten years, there are ways I want to express myself that don't fit into the constraints of this platform any more.

I want to join a system of APIs and feed readers and linked applications over the network (while keeping my creative data close to home), and access clean object-oriented code and well-suited modules written by other folks to better manage and communicate with the world. This old horse PHP application isn't going to cut it.

Unfortunately my millions of words and article count just shy of 7,000 has become something of a yoke around my neck. I would love to design a new system around my needs and at the same time bring this old data around with me. As I attempt to get other non-Internet related parts of my life simplified and organized, this baggage is something I need to leave behind.

I plan to use what tools are already written around these pages to clean up and archive this old site in place on it's 10 year anniversary. All the canonical article URIs will stay as they are, but all the dynamically generated search pages will disappear by redirecting to the most prominent article for a certain term. All the pages will be conspicuously marked as an archive and commenting will be turned off.

This is part of a larger goal in my life. I hope to cross the inevitable road into my 30th birthday this month with a clean slate and a placid and holistic view of what I want to accomplish, largely free from the stress of second-guessing myself and being weighed down by the acquired clutter (intellectual, physical, and emotional) of all those years. I very much believe it's within my grasp, but will take letting go of some things that have been an inseparable part of my life for so long.

I'll have a small party on October 25, 2009 to commemorate my ten years of content creation here, and then flip the switch. Something new will emerge in this place, but it's unlikely to look anything like what you see here today. In the meantime, I will continue writing and posting on all the social network sites linked off the front page of vees.net and communicating with everyone as best I can.

I welcome all feedback, suggestions, questions, and words of support and encouragement.

Rob Carlson
September 3, 2009
rob@vees.net

#6965

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