Introducing Jangly Ganglia

Published 27 Feb 2006

I have been a bit quiet lately. This is largely because I got a spark of inspiration (sadly a bit rare these days…) and launched a new project over at Jangly Ganglia.

Some of you may remember when I spoke about buying the domain on a whim after reading a passage in Cryptonomicon. I sat on the name for several months, and then had a brainstorm last week. I realized I needed a way to stay positive— that no matter what happened in my life, I was focusing only on the negative.

This is a function of my biology; I have had depression for about as long as I can remember and have been actively dealing with it for about 5 years. Although I can keep things pretty much under control, I needed something else to remind me that life is not all gloom and doom. Jangly Ganglia stepped in to fill that purpose.

Jangly is a blog, where every day I post something positive, funny, wacky, or inspiring that happened to me. It is a way of forcing myself to realize that these kinds of things really do occur for me, and they really do occur every day. The public nature of the blog format keeps me honest— I can’t cheat if I know others are watching. And hopefully it also provides some laughs or inspiration for others that are in the same boat as me.

I set up Jangly using ExpressionEngine rather than my beloved Textpattern for a couple of reasons. First EE has more sophisticated membership permissions that TXP. My vision is to make Jangly into a community where anyone that wants to make the committment to themselves to post something positive from their life every day will be able to join the project have the place to do so. Ideally this will turn into a community that is using blogging for something innovative and helpful to their lives.

Second EE is having a contest that I have entered in hopes of winning a forum, license, or hosting that will allow me to do the above. Entries will be announced on March 1 and winners March 15, so stay tuned and wish me luck.

In the meantime, if you’d like to give the project a try, I am taking submissions over at JG. I will post snippets for you until I get a license that will allow me to add members to post for themselves.

So how will this all affect Interllectual? Hopefully it won’t. I will still be posting here— this is the place where I post rants, professional articles, and longer snippets about my life. What I am doing here is completely different from what I’m doing over there. If anything, I’m hoping to write more here as I’m able to deal better with my biology.

So, enjoy Jangly Ganglia, and contribute if you’re so inspired. If not, I’ll see you here before long…

Filed under Depression, Personal