The True Story of Plerd, or: Why I Wrote a Blog System in Twenty Fifteen

By Jason McIntosh (‎jmac‎)
Date: Tuesday, 9 June 2015 11:30
Duration: 20 minutes
Target audience: Any
Language: English
Tags: blogs creativity despair hacking joy media perl social

After LiveJournal’s star faded, Jason McIntosh spent several years wandering the fields of blog software and services, and therefore didn’t actually write anything.

Last winter, in the hours while his self-critical mind slept off Christmas dinner, Jason wrote — at desperate speed — his own blogging software, which all can agree represents a terribly foolish waste of time and talent in a world so full of wonderful blog software and services. What he ended up with, “Plerd”, feels like a joke, based on absurdly opinionated design decisions, and doomed to a future of a hundred backwards-incompatible forced refactorings.

He installed it on his server anyway, and has been blogging regularly ever since.

This talk will recount one social-media refugee’s journey through the blighted landscape of contemporary blog platforms, and why he could settle in none. It will examine the value of canards against wheel-reinvention, and why one should sometimes feel okay ignoring these. It will touch on death, crisis, cat poetry, Perl, Python, PHP, and doing your best creative work despite all these awful things.

Attended by: Jason McIntosh (‎jmac‎), Andrew Hewus Fresh (‎AFresh1‎), Dave Rolsky (‎autarch‎), D Ruth Bavousett (‎druthb‎), Curtis Jewell (‎CSJewell‎), Derek Clifford, Daniel Fackrell, Adam Dutko (‎StylusEater‎), Charles McGarvey (‎CCM‎), Joseph Hall, Jared Miller, Graham TerMarsch, Beth Rhinelander, Jan Peterson (‎jlp‎), Joe Kline (‎gizmo‎), Brian Wisti, Thomas Stanton (‎tstanton‎), Josh Lavin (‎digory‎), Maxwell Cabral, Justin Wheeler (‎dnm‎), Samuel Smith (‎esaym‎), Louis Erickson, Michael LaGrasta, Liam McNerney (‎Lthemick‎), morgan jones, Tom Green (‎Tom‎), Brad Oaks (‎bradoaks‎), R Geoffrey Avery (‎rGeoffrey‎),