About
I started blogging in August 2002 using Blogger.com. Idiot Wind was my first blog. The title, as you may already know, was taken from a Bob Dylan’s song of the same name in ‘Blood on the Tracks’, which, imho, was Dylan’s best album.
I switched to MovableType on a shared web host soon afterward when I needed some more flexibility in designing my own templates, running some javascripts and posting/storing of some image files. Blogger at that time could not do any of these – it was still in the pre-Google era.
MT was (and probably still is) a great piece of blogging software. It’s documentation was first class and it was supported by a strong and helpful community. There were also loads of plugins/add-ons to enhance its functionality and to tailor it to suit each individual’s blogging preferences. Despite a growing number of blogging platforms and software, MT had remained the undisputable #1 choice of many a blogger. Things only seemed to have taken an abrupt turn after they changed MT’s licensing conditions.
I posted fairly regularly up until mid 2005 in ‘Idiot Wind’ but gradually moved to another blog ‘China Doll’. I had wanted to use ‘China Doll’ to post a translated copy of some noteworthy articles from the mainland so that they could be shared among people who do not understand Chinese. Unfortunately, the burden of real life began to get into the way and the long working hours had prevented me from undertaking such an ambitious task.
I dug up Idiot Wind about a month’s ago when I was moving my web hosting account. My first attempt was to resurrect it using MT4 but I couldn’t successfully rebuild the site after importing the old entries (in retrospect, it was more a problem with my new web host but I wasn’t aware of it at that time). After a dozen of so repeated failures in rebuilding the site and Internal Server Error 500, I gave up MT4 and tried WordPress which was offered as free one-click install from my new web host. Lo and behold – everything was alright the very first time and it was FAST. So here I am. WordPress 2.5.
Resurrecting Idiot Wind is perhaps merely for old time’s sake, this will be a busy year for me and my family and it is unlikely that I will be able to blog as often as I would like to. However, if you are reading this, I do hope you are enjoying your visit here.
Good luck.