The Change

It was a wish to create a frontpage on my homepage that made me decide to move the entire blog from bartwestgeest.dk/blog to bartwestgeest.dk. Now I publish the blog in the same bw.dk/blog but use WordPress.org to publish a static page under bw.dk.

A new subject: Writing Tools

I added a number of posts from another blog that I decided to give up. That was a blog about writing software. It took me too much time to maintain it as ambitious as I had set it up, but since I still like the subject I decided to merge it into this blog and to work on it whenever I feel like doing so. That part is added under the menu item “writing tools” with posts under the category “tools“. I have moved the connected diigo account with lots of “writing tools links” to my own diigo account, and as soon as I have cleaned up the mess I plan to add a link to it here on my blog.

The Theme

At the occasion of the movement I had another look at the theme available for WordPress.org, but after another evening pleasantly surfing from theme to theme I decided that the theme I was already using, the Igloo theme by Bizzthemes.com, actually serves me well. I even decided to buy the premium version. The free version of the theme works very well, but the payed version gives some more design tweaking possibilities and things like shortcode and slider-settings etc. In pure theory it would have been possible to tweak everything myself, but that would have taken me months, if not years, as I know practically nothing about coding. And as a member of bizzthemes.com I have access to the forum and direct messages to other members and the maker of the theme, so help is always near. The company is very young, let’s hope it becomes a success with lots of members and possibilities.

The Future

As I now can add pages and connect them through the frontpage I have the possibility to fill up my webhotel with whatever I want using WordPress and the Igloo theme. Apart from growing the blog-section and the writing-tools section, I hope to put some texts there, maybe longer articles or anything that I would like the reader to spent more time on than an average blog post. But who knows, maybe it will turn into something completely different.

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Music: Hank Williams – I saw The Light (1948)

It is hard to think of a truly good reason for us humans being around, if you ask me. There are several reasons possible, but which one you choose is depending whether or not you are religious, positively minded or for example an oblivious sports fan. If you are not one of the lucky ones that can somehow find a reason, chances are that you are wandering around trying hard to find some purpose in life.

Not knowing what it all is for is one of the worst things that can happen to you. When there is no good reason for the existence of any part of the world around you, why would you bother trying anything, or even care about something?

The one thing we do care about is our own person. We are the ones that see, feel and hear the world, and most of us are aware that we have a huge influence upon the interaction between ourselves and our surrounding. This means that the best thing to do in life is to develop ourselves and to be good to us and the people we meet.

This isn’t always easy though, because when, for whatever reason, you meet boundaries that limit your possibility to develop or when you never seem to meet anyone willing to share at least some goodness with you, you might feel like your life is an endless trying to swim up the river with hardly any gain what so ever.

Lucky are those that find their call, their niche, and that find a way to build upon their talents, to open up unexpected possibilities within themselves and their world, to blossom.

If you manage to, let’s say, start a bank in your neighbourhood, and you love your work and things go well, you thrive and will be able to do good to yourself and others.

If not, you struggle and hopefully will try again and again, and one more time. Will you ever see the light?

Religion can serve as such an opener, as it gives, without needing any prequalifications, a sudden goal and aim in life. Here you can be good to others and therewith also to yourself. Your life has meaning, you are saved from trying and trying, no more swimming upstream.

Maybe that is was drives us, whether we become a bank director or a good religious person, we are saved and have a purpose, we are doing well and feel happy.

And who knows, this might include the answer why religion is less attractive in the western world at the moment. We have many opportunities to become bank director, nurse, a world traveler or a splendid partner. We can choose from many possibilities with hardly any financial or material worries.

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It irritates me that a general article in Danish about the name Lucifer is linked to a Dutch article about the devil, without mentioning any roman predecessors. This is in my opinion another small sign about the Dutch society still being so entangled in christianty that it misforms history. There are many prechristian traditions, names and stories that were transformed at one point in history to fit into christianity, and I think that it is our duty to at least inform each other that there actually was life before that.

The English Wikipedia page refers briefly to the name being a latin word given to the planet Venus and at the bottom of the page it links to an article about the ancient Greek god Eosphoros. They also mention the use of the name Lucifer or the interpretation of it in other beliefs than Christianity.

I do not know how to make a remark about this on the Dutch Wikipedia pages – I might have to read the Wikipedia introduction first.

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As a writer you write, as an editor you edit and as a publisher you publish. The writer in you wants a tool that can create texts as quickly and easy as possible. Quick because when you are finally getting some good ideas or when the words are coming to your mind faster than you can type,  you need a tool that reacts immediately. Your mind is occupied with trying to grab the ideas and impulses so you also want something that is fool-proof and not distracting.

After many thoughts and attempts I settled for the one obvious tool that does the job best: a plain text-editor.

Text it

A text editor is a small program that basically produces .txt files, which is just about the most bare and smallest kind of text-file you can produce. No different letter types or sizes, nice layout or  italics or bold, but just text, ready to be used everywhere you want. Because of the simple .txt format you can take it anywhere you like in the world of text-based software. Open it in your favourite word-processor and create the most beautiful layout you can think of or send it by email to your best friend who can read it instantly in the mail or open it in what ever software and operating system he or she might happen to use. Copy and past that long post into your blogging tool or create an archive of lightweight basic text files, future-proof.

Text files are very convenient to back-up as their small size guarantees the shortest possible uploading time to a backup service, be it on the web or on your memory key. It will take you very likely more than a lifetime to write 2GB of .txt files, so you don’t have to worry about running out of space anywhere.

But one of the main advantages is the quick response time of text editors. They open instantly and make my old computer react like a brand new top model. Keep a shortcut at hand and whenever an idea pops up write it down immediately and save it, either in a file of its own or keep a file open to gather related ideas.

Save it

Save your files naming them with the current date like yymmdd (for example: 100211) and you automatically create a diary or journal that is stored in the right order and with the exact date you had that brilliant idea.

When you consequently start a new file each day you can keep track of different versions by copying the lightweight .txt file of the day before in your new file and edit and save it.

Control it

In order to keep control over your growing archive of .txt files you can use a search-tool that you tweak to index your archive of .txt files only. In this way you will be able to search very fast and won’t get distracted by .mp3 files or house-cleaning schedules. To ease up the searching process I add tags to pieces of text that I think I might want to use or reread later. A tag like #(tag), as for example: #quote or #idea, doesn’t really work in the search-tools I used as they apparently don’t “read” the #-symbol. So I opted for tag-quote or tag-idea that is certainly indexed by all search tools.

Screenshot of the results of a search in my .txt files (using Tracker).

I put the tag on a new line and I add a few words that somehow describe the piece of text I am referring too as these words show up in my search results directly behind the tag.

Screenshot of a text editor with tabs (gedit)

Choose a text editor that supports tabs so you can open search results or other multiple files you are working on in the same window and quickly switch between them. These could for example be chapters of a book, a plot or character descriptions, quotes or articles. I keep always two tabs open; a todo list or notes file and a file with the tags I use so I can be consistent.

Screenshot of the my complete screen.

Most text editors have the F11 shortcut that will turn it into a full-screen productivity machine and with a default easy-for-the-eye background colour there will be no stopping you.

Well, I can’t see a reason anyway.

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Conrad Busken Huet

This quote reminds me that writing in the first place is something you just want to do – and as such it shouldn’t be aimed directly at an audience. Liberty is available if you dare to let go of your always weary “Lizard Brain”, as Seth Godin calls  it – the part that is always weary about the consequences. The Dutch journalist and literature critic Busken Huet (1826 -1886) apparently did well in writing freely what he thought, but by publishing it he created many conflicts:

Zijn doel, als van ieder werkelijk schrijver – van de lyrische dichter tot de man van wetenschap toe – was zijn gedachten in een zo klaar, zo suggestief, zo adequaat mogelijke vorm uit te drukken waarbij het gelezen willen worden een secundaire vraag van zelfbesef en financiële noodzaak is.(…) Deze denkmoed, onafhankelijk, candide en wereldvreemd is de motor van alle veroveringen in het rijk van de geest en was ook de motor van Huets kritisch vermogen. Maar wie die gave bezit en wie er zo mee woekert als Huet gedaan heeft, moet afstand doen van het verlangen in ongestoorde vrede met zijn medemensen te leven.

bron: Jan Romein en Annie Romein-Verschoor, Erflaters van onze beschaving.
Em. Querido’s Uitgeverij, Amsterdam 1977 page 728

My humble translation attempt:

“His aim, as that of any real writer – from the lyrical poet to the man of science – was to express his thoughts as clearly, as suggestive, as precise as possible, whereas the wish to be read is a secondary question of self-awareness and financial necessity. (…) This courage of thinking, independent, candid and otherwordly is the engine of all conquests in the spiritual world and was also the engine of Huet’s critical capabilities. But he who posses this gift and who makes it profitable as Huet has done, has to abandon the desire to live in undisturbed peace with his fellow human beings.”

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I think that there is a great deal of truth in the argument, and yet I am unsure.

People have always looked for easy entertainment, from listening to the gossiping neighbour to reading cheap love- or supermanstories. The majority of people have always been oblivious to the more profound thoughts of their time.
The biggest change over the last decennia has been the growing accessibility of both the producing and receiving means of public information for a much larger age group. This means that we moved from a intellectual culture that was made by and aimed at persons of at least 25 years of age, to a culture where the participants are between 1 and 101 years old. It was for example not possible some 10 to 20 years ago to read thousands of articles, blogposts, comments and opinions by 12 to 20 year old people from all over the world.

Today’s technology makes every kind of information easily available to everybody and we can all ventilate our opinion in many ways. We are free to choose whatever tv-channel we want and we can read exactly what we want the truth to be in the many articles on the internet, not just what we are supposed to read or listen to.
The level of genuine interest in the more evolved and intelligent culture might still be the same, but it got company with the explosive growth of other interest groups.
Bookshops truly start selling to the masses, libraries change ideology, newspapers get even more shallow. Yes, but one could also say: The truth is coming out. We are what we are. Some of us read great literature, most of us read detective stories.
Should we worry about this or should we be happy that our real interest is visible now?
We have the choice to be critical, the freedom to make up our own mind, and make decisions about what we want to read, see or listen to.

Because that is what we need to do in our times of information overflow. We have to restrict ourselves to the things that really matter to us. A huge task indeed, as it is very easy to get seduced by unnecessary information, but what truly matters is available too, in large quantities. You just have to want to find it.

(Picture by Flickr user chuckyeager)

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I was happy with the Statement-theme by BlogOhBlog that I used, but decided at this unfortunate occasion to switch to this Igloo-theme from BizzArtic nevertheless as it seems to have many more options and I have good experiences with BizzArtic. I have not tweaked all things properly yet, but I hope to fix that soon.

The feedburner feed is a mess for example, as I can not access the old feedburner.com feed. Feedburner has been taken over by Google so now the feedburner address feedburner.com links to feedburner.google.com, where my feed unfortunately doesn’t show up in the list of feeds I own. So for now I ran the feedburner feed through feedburner, producing an interesting http://feeds.feedburner.com/feedburner/iILz link.

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There are texts on the internet that are so stupid that they irritate. Maybe we have too many voices. Many are screaming and trying to sound wise and some, probably to attract readers, abandon good sense or judgement.
I wish there was a method to exclude rubbish from good things. I suppose there is only one way: discipline in judging for yourself what you want to spent your time on .
I’d like to organize my attention in a way that is just like the best way to watch television: Check what programs will be shown before you turn on the television and decide what (if) you want to watch.
For the internet world that might be translated into: Keep your feedreader clean and healthy, limit the number of subscriptions as good as you can and be very aware if you surf outside it.

(Original spark: Peter Englund – Nyårslöfte).

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