Full, and unorganized.
But I think I see a common technological thread between the in-box and the blog. One that kind-of explains why both are messy.
So I thought I’d write that up.
I only ride them, I don’t know what makes them work.
This blog got body-slammed by Google Search, on or about August 18, 2024.
Our most serene and benevolent caregiver, Google Search. May she ever answer our questions.
I’m flailing, trying to get any idea as to what happened, let alone “fix it”. Whatever “it” might be. If it can be “fixed”. You get the drift. I don’t know enough to know what I don’t know.
In the meantime … when in doubt, look at the data.
So, how is my blog like my email? Technically speaking.
Source: My inbox file, using VEDIT software.
The actual content is stored as an unreadable database. Software generates what you read, on the fly, anew, each time you read it.
I think of this blog as a set of pages that I wrote. As if somewhere, there were some file directory, and each file in that directory was one of these blog posts. Whole and entire. A page image, or close enough. I’d settle for something like a Windows folder full of Word files.
That is not, however, how the blog thinks of itself. There is no stored set of readable blog pages anywhere. There is nothing analogous to a directory of Word documents.
It’s all just one big ugly-ass database.
My email uses that same setup. The actual emails-looking-like-emails do not exist anywhere. My email is literally the (ugly-ass) database pictured (in small part) in blue above.
In both cases, the readable content you see via your software is composed on-the-fly. E.g., what I see as “my inbox” is not an object, but the human-readable index of my current inbox database, as the software generates it for this email session.
I guess this is students-of-the-obvious to many people. At some level, I already knew my email was stored as … sure, a database or something. Yet I have a hard time getting my mind around that. There is no directory full of email files sitting somewhere.
But less obviously, storage of the content in a database is what makes it ridiculously hard to re-organize either my inbox, or my blog. For me, at least.
The only way I can get at the content — the database — is through my native (email or blog) software. The native software won’t let me do much. And, because databases are touchy things, I’m not all that keen on trying to circumvent the limits of the software.
All of this train of though is brought on by not being to get my email software to generate a text listing of what’s in my in-box. I can see what’s in my in-box. I cannot for the life of me get the software to produce a text list of it.
The next rational step is to find a database program that will read the raw email database file, and proceed from there.
But, much like trying to read Google Search’s mind, I’m not sure the juice is worth the squeeze.
