Thursday, October 18, 2007

Re-factoring Blog Entries.

As I started to write a blog entry about installing Tomcat with Luntbuild on Nexenta, I noticed that a few themes have started to repeat themselves from previous entries, i.e., the initial setup of a Solaris Zone and the installation of the JDK in a Zone. This presents me with an interesting dilemma: should I simply copy-paste-modify those lines from a previous blog entry, or should I re-factor from the specific to the general, give those their own space and change the original blog to reference the new, generic entry? This seems to raise a question about the nature of this blog: is it an organic journal of the specific steps taken on a journey toward some unknown end, or is each entry a constantly-evolving atom where the posted date represents only the inception of the kernel of the posted idea and not necessarily the finality of the written words?
For now, I have chosen the revisionist path with this restriction: I will try my darndest to ensure that no information is lost as entries are shifted and re-arranged and as the generic is extracted from the specific. As much as a day-to-day linear progression of thought would be personally valuable, in the end the repetition of similar items or the tracking of half-formed ideas interspersed across days could end up being a tedious and convoluted mess that I will ultimately be disinclined to maintain and that no one will want to read. Of course, constant referencing and de-referencing can be equally tedious and convoluted, so I will try as well to be politic in the sections I choose to re-factor.

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