To all who understood that, or the rest who already know what I’m talking about, or use it even (on my blog or not), this lamentation’s dedicated to you.

Certainly, web feeds do get rid of all the distractions of a normal website. You need not waste bandwidth downloading CSS files; JS files and a million and twelve background images. Fast, pure, efficient, brutal. Technological. Simple. Industrialist. Scientific. You get to see where you wanted to read, after all. That is like the main reason you follow the site, ain’t it?

BUT NO! What if, the site author NEVER meant all the CSS; JS and background images as distractions? They could be distractions to YOU, but ART to HIM! They were meant to be savoured together with the rest of the text, the blog posts. A grand scheme of things. A holistic picture. An overall experience.

Oh well, that’s how I see it anyway. Why else would I spend time into making the header and loading image, customizing the theme and installing the many plugins in The Staccato Slur, if it was not meant for your dear enjoyment, my readers; the appreciators of my work? Sure, it might not be van Gogh to you, or that you might already be bored of seeing the same thing all the time, but hey, it’s part of the grand design. It’s like, erm… Ordering fine dining, takeaway please. Reading a book, using Kindle. Dating a girl, straight to the bed. Okay maybe not. Horribly bad assumptions there.

Yes okay, you get the idea. Every time you are there, doing the same thing as you did before, seeing the same thing you would have seen for ages, that is there. Whatever attracted you to it in the first place; the novelty of the very first.

The atmosphere, the façade!

Alright. Why in spite all these then do I still give my readers the option of subscribing to The Staccato Slur via RSS? I could easily disable it via my WordPress Admin console.

Here is what I think, my part of the deal. If you fancy feeds and cannot bear to part with the convenience it brings,  sure, go ahead and use it on The Staccato Slur. No issue, only if you would come back, once in a while, to see the site in its entirety… Kinda like going for a live concert for your favourite band for once, instead of just listening to their MP3s and watching their DVDs, eh? Oh, and when other people ask you about The Staccato Slur, be sure to direct them to the main site first. Don’t just forward articles from the feed! Deal?

Ah well, by the way, I do use feeds as well, if you wonder.  But purely for data/news sites and updates, technical stuff about WordPress and Linux that doesn’t usually have an aesthetical element to its content layout. Distractions, that is. Heh, but I do go to the website every now and then to see if they have changed the layout to something more pleasant, and of course, to bask in the non-design of things. The whole experience, still, even if its of a mediocre aesthetic.

For purposes of consistency, I have migrated The Staccato Slur from ajanimgo.com to staccatoslur.com. The old domain name will still continue to exist, but henceforth redirect visitors to the new domain while people get used to the change.  All other related web presences e.g. email address, have been adapted to the new domain as well.

In short, reach The Staccato Slur at http://staccatoslur.com from now on. Shouldn’t mispell it if you can pronounce it.

Driving this opportunity for change is a migration to a new web host, Cyber Ultra. My old subscription at 3iX had expired, and let us just mention that Cyber Ultra gave me a better value-for-money ratio. 3iX is a good host in its own right, though.

For the WordPress geeks, I have also done a review of the site’s engine; installing new plugins and removing obselete/unoptimized ones. Instead of using the old WP Super Cache, I am now using the W3 Total Cache that does database caching; gzipping; minification and CDN as well in one single plugin. Along with the optimization of a few site images, this should give quite a boost to the responsiveness and speed of the site. Unfortunately this has broken quite a few features e.g. Snap Shots; collapsible sidebars, but I think the end gain in speed could be worth it.

The admin backend is powered now by Fluency Admin. Looks that are consistent; features that are time-saving – why not?

These, and a series of other unstated plugin/method changes now make it easier than before to maintain The Staccato Slur, and understand from an admin perspective.

Does this mean that I will be writing more? Maybe, now that my staff job in the army gives me marginally more time in comfort to think and write.  The alternative would be just to let The Staccato Slur stagnant as usual, but after writing to you of all these changes,  I would guess letting it stay dormant would be dumb. After all, some of these changes e.g. domain name; hosting, cost money. But then, if I had no plans to write more on The Staccato Slur, then why would I have wasted money and time on all these? Hmm… Begging the question.

Certainly, that is existentialist “bad faith”. I always have the time to write. In camp, I could ink my greater thoughts on paper during whatever free time there is, but interrupted philosophical writing, as a result of the fluid military lifestyle, always sucks;even my in-camp penned reflections on military life are often short, brief and staccato. I’m not sure anyone else can understand them for I leave alot of the context out in these writings. The essence of sentences.

Writing on paper, then transferring everything inked online is not precisely an option too. You see, I know that when I am copying a text over anywhere, my hypercorrection kicks in, and I might end up rewriting the entire piece. Hence, my insistence for time to type on The Staccato Slur does create some form of inertia where writing is concerned, for I have not written anything deep, properly for long. I have not started too either the novel I was planning, or the series on existentialism I promised.

I should find some way around this, especially if it’s going to last for about a year and half more. In fact my will to post is because of me being on block leave now for about ten days. Not to worry though, in my mind everything is exploding as usual and ideas fly freely – I’m not stagnanted in thought. Some claim that being in the military reduces their intelligence and vocabulary prowress though. Hmm.Perhaps some just need exclusively a paper education to work their minds.

I feel like being a rare bitch. How about allowing me to say this?

Picking up a passion for the arts and humanities, such that you can be inspired from and speculate on the human condition, anywhere, anytime, without needing to face some abstract numbers and complex physical theories to get your mental fix.

Well, that was un-academic and un-multidisciplinary a comment but hah, it felt himbo-ly great. Don’t weigh it against my book cred though.