The Goddess Room Reborn

The whole process of writing this entry took ages. I wanted to write it weeks ago, and post it here on this site, but I had two problems.

1. ndelamiko.com was woefully out of date. Running Joomla 1.0.12 (:O) and
2. While I had been cross-posting here with journalspace, there were real gaps in the dates regarding posts, and finally
3. When journalspace.com died, and the death of the blog that was hosted there became incontrovertible (WOE, WOE!) I had only about 600 of my posts backed-up in different journalling software, and a four-year-old av.html file (the entire journal in HTML as provided via JS’s old interface, before peanut.)

Things were looking bleak.

I knew immediately I wanted to move the blog here to this domain.

I silently thanked my prescience for registering sungoddessroom.com and using that as my main URL for my journalspace.com subdomain for more than year. Because it was nothing to update the DNS servers and have it point here. However, that doesn’t help with the now almost six-year spidering that went on at http://sungoddess.journalspace.com/.

I suppose there is nothing I can do about that. I was about a month a way from hitting half a million readers too. Alack and alas.

Let me pause for the cause and make a comment about journalspace and it’s demise.

In October 2002, I started a column at the local paper I was working for and called it The Goddess Room. Once a week, it was my space to put anything I wanted to say into print. Then in January of 2003, when I was into the swing of being a journalist again, that paper got absorbed into a bigger newspaper, and my column was no more. I still had my job, but suddenly I was thrust into an entirely different environment, one in which I did not sign on for, so I proceeded to suffer from some of the worst writer’s block I had had in years.

It was painful to want to write and be unable to commit anything into any kind of permanence. To constantly start and never finish pieces. It was worse, because I was working at a newspaper, I found it even more pressure to produce content. And I didn’t. I didn’t write for months. I faffed a lot.

Then Keifel told me about journalspace, where he had created a blog a few weeks previous, and I joined re-creating The Goddess Room there. The major difference was that the space restrictions were removed, the mores and governing principles of newspaper writing were gone, and this was a space in which I could publicly express much. Also, because of the unprecendented control over the layout the JS offered, I could make this space look like anything I wanted.

Then an emotional shit storm hit me and a shitty guy turned me inside out, and suddenly I needed to write. I had to purge my life of the emotional overload I was labouring under. So I did.

I wrote consistently until Dayo was born and the time and impetus to write got subsumed by the urgency of survival as a single parent.

Looking back over the five and three-quarter years of blogging, I realise that the space I created for myself to write was vital to my identity and my own development. So, determined, I began the labourious process of rebuilding The Goddess Room here.

I had to scrap the old site, migrate the content to a Joomla 1.5 installation. Much experimentation and playing with blogging solutions available through the JED, made me realise WordPress really is a much better blogging engine that any of the native Joomla components, but I still LOVE my Joomla, so what could I do?

Then last week I realised that CorePHP had released a WordPress integrated solution for Joomla, so I closed my eyes and bought the subscription that would allow me access to the downloads. Installed it. turned on the XML-RPC services and proceeded to migrate what I had remaining of my blog posts. I also imported what I had left from BSG@Journalspace (my BSG blog obviously). I have only managed to recover a little over 600 posts so far.

Dylan gave me a complete backup of the goddess room, so I DO in fact have every post and most of my comments, but the folder system for the account and the way the posts are backed up is murky. I have no titles, no dates, and no tags or categories and frankly, the thought of wading through nearly six years and 2000 posts like that is DAUNTING.

So, there you have it… this is what I have managed to pull together in about three weeks of work in my spare time. Look around, this is the goddess room reborn. Sadly we’re greatly reduced in content, but, BUT, I will keep poking in the archives and pulling out what I can a bit at a time. Hopefully I can get all those posts back into this database.

I am loving WordPress. It is exciting to be working with both WordPress and Joomla in an installation, even if it’s hard to get the plugins for WP to work with the modified Joomla installation. I find myself hacking the code for the modules to make them work with both Joomla’s styling and menu ID system, but that is fun for me not pressure. CorePHP says they’re going to release more plugins, but it cannot happen too soon for me. I may play around with the code and hack some of them to see if I can get it to happen. I’ve had some limited success so far.

It’s actually been a real catharsis to go through my MacJournal and read posts from five years ago. Reading the stuff about Sweet Thing and then YMK, made me kind of nostalgic. Especially the YMK stuff. (Sweet Thing is just mild disgust at this point.) YMK and I really, really, really had a good time together. He still has a soft part of me open to him, even as we have both sort of moved on. Re-reading those posts though, I was right back there… reliving them, missing him too in a strange way.

Reading my observations and experiences spread out over such a long period has also been empowering. Because it’s literally been what I’ve recorded of my life. In fact, it’s making me want to write again. To share my world and experiences in this kinds of space. Because, while I have kept journals my whole life (since I was about six or seven), this journal is the one I have maintained the longest, and has had the most of my energy. It’s the one I go back to over and over and over. So, while i have been exceptionally quiet since Dayo’s birth, this has largely been because I know that people who wish me ill read what I write here, and I did not want to expose myself to them in that way. Even as I wrote previously that I would never let anyone chase me away from using my voice, they did and it happened naturally, even though I thought it was for my own reasons. I look back on the stuff I’ve written since the beginning of 2007, and I see how impersonal my blog became. There was very little of me in it.

That is hopefully going to change.

Last, I want to connect with the people who read my blog regularly before. I know you guys have been loyal to this space and I appreciate that more than anything. It’s when you all make comments and reach out to me that I truly understand how much what I write here has the power to effect people where they live, work and play. I love writing, and write to please myself, but it’s validating to have people appreciate my voice, and it’s for that reason I want to keep writing.

So here it is: The Goddess Room reborn.

Liked it? Take a second to support me on Patreon!