Golublog: An Anthropology Blog

I’m redesigning this web site.

When I first got started, almost three years ago, I installed Gray Matter in order to experiment with the creative writing that I had given up when I entered graduate school. I quickly found out that returning from the field was hard — many of my friends were no longer in Chicago, and I was too intimidated by my dissertation to face it. As a result I installed Movable Type and began producing posts on anthropology and technology, discovering in the process a remarkably rich community of fellow sould who were thinking aloud online about things that I cared about. But over time my life returned to normal and my dissertation and other professional activities consumed more and more of my time. I installed WordPress and my posts grew shorter and more personal (although less confessional). Today WordPress tells me I’ve posted 37 stories about my life and only 11 entries on (anthrop|techn)ology. Last week I realized I’d been dropped from Mark Wood’s blogroll.

The web has changed, too. Google emerged full-blown from Stanford’s head while I was still in Papua New Guinea. CSS had come a long way, and this thing called ‘PHP’ had become ubiquitous as well. Other acronyms have grown up since then: xml, rss, soap, atom. The middleware level of the web has thickened as well – we don’t have link pages and referer logs any more, we have technorati, bloglines, and del.icio.us. I used to brag that my website ‘doesn’t just look good in lynx, it looks like lynx.’ But in a world where designing with standards and alternate stylesheets means crafting code which looks good on both handhelds and the command line, this sort of thing just sounds like a corny joke.

So I’m redesigning the website.

I want the blog to occupy a niche in my biography rather than fill the cracks in my life. I want it to reflect my professional interests, rather than balance awkwardly like a private confession in the most public space. I want it to be integrated into who I am. So there are going to be some changes.

There will be a new design, with a working RSS feed. There will be more focus on what I study – Papua New Guinea, politics and policy in the Asia-Pacific, and videogames. There will be two columns (!). There will be a sideblog that will keep its finger on the throbbing pulse of contemporary sociocultural anthropology. And yes, there will still be Jedi fan fiction.

So stay tuned. Times they are a’changin’.

Thanks for reading.