I've been discovering that the content management system powering this blog is incredibly versatile. For several years, I've been imagining what I want in a system that I can use to take notes, organize them, publish articles, and track a variety of creative projects. At first glance, a blog is a daily journal. The basic view of a blog is chronological or historical - you'll see the posts in the sequence I make them. But each entry becomes a "unit" of its own, and I can give them labels that identify their topics. It's then easy for me (or you) to look at all the posts on one topic.
But I can also create "books" out of them, by setting up a "table of contents" post that list specific posts that I decide belong together. I'll also put them in the order that I think they should be in, and I'll be able to see what I need to write to "fill in the gaps". Literally creating a book - or books. My ambition is to have a bookshelf here that is "the encyclopedia of Andrew Jaremko".
I have another agenda with this blog, too. I want to excite you about creating animation, and specifically to create animation using the software that I've been writing. Some is freeware, and you can use it to get a taste of classic animation. Some is shareware, with features that make animating easier, or more flexible, or more creative. I'll be referring to my site regularly in this blog. It's StopMotion-Software.com, in case you'd like to have a look. Here's a little piece of my animation that you'll also see on that site.
And this shows one of the most exciting things about assembling books on the Web - moving illustrations. Perfect for showing you what I'm doing and how you can do it too. It's a challenge for authors - to be good at writing, illustrating, and making movies - but it's a challenge I like.
And the best part: the content management part of this is free, and I don't have to do anything "behind the scenes". I began setting up a content management system on StopMotion-Software.com and it turned into a lot of work. Here, all I have to do is write and illustrate. (A little knowledge of HTML helps, but it isn't absolutely essential.)
This blog is free on Google and I'm using Google to host all my videos. They have an agenda of their own, of course, but I'm perfectly happy to ride along with them, and hopefully contribute to their success as well.
My various ambitions mean that, when you look at my posts sequentially, they'll jump around among topics and you won't necessarily get much of my ongoing biography. But that's not what I'm here for. In six months I hope to have a start on the bookshelf and a better idea of whether I can pull together anything coherent. I plan to allow comments to my posts (I'll review them and delete things I consider spam without hesitation or explanation) so we will find out whether I'm speaking to people or "crying in the wilderness". I'll also be tinkering with the blog as I go along.
A note added on February 24, 2008 - I've been discovering lots of things about blogging. Among them, that the posting date can be edited (at least on blogger.com) to change the order that posts appear in. I'm creating some posts about important animators and hiding them "before" this post - which remains the first post I wrote. I'm starting to do some of the things I talk about here; time will tell if it works the way I imagined. The main access to these "earlier" posts will be from other pages here and on other sites.
