Toward post 4000

Ephemerides keep coming. Early January this blog crossed the 11 years mark of continuous posting, with no more than a couple of weeks break for travel or sickness. In about 5 posts we may reach post #4000. And times have changed.  What you are looking out today is one of the very last times that the scheme inaugurated years ago will appear. Enjoy the format presentation last days if you liked it, rejoice if you hated it. This has been the Venezuelan blog with the longest serving format theme. I am willing to bet!


Times require a need for simplification. The death of Chavez did not simplify anything, it made it all worse. Though had he not died we would be in big trouble anyway, just with a little bit more of international $$$ credit as Chavez would always look more secure than Maduro in office. Today's crisis may have arrived, say, in May 2014...

Maduro insecurity is making the regime evolve fast into an outright dictatorship to try to hide its weakness. We were a dictatorship trying to pass as democracy through elections under Chavez. But with Maduro now it is brutal electoral fraud. Doubled with what is now an open military regime though we cannot tell for sure how united the army is.

Thus there is a need to refocus the message and the means, as already hinted last December. This is not anymore an explanatory blog on Venezuela, this is becoming a resistance blog.

I have already modified and updated the page presentation of the blog though more editing is still needed. I am preparing to open a brand new blog which will include all the texts in Spanish under a different platform. As the regime is censoring openly web pages (ask Alek Boyd or Dollar Today), it is important that I have another blog on WordPress just in case. Also some people do not like that I mix my post languages. I suppose that now that the Spanish written posts reach more than half the average English post visitors then it is worth to develop a full fledged Spanish texts blog and see what happens.

The design will be simple and standard Blogger. I simply cannot afford to pay someone to set up something jazzy (though if anyone volunteers or offers to pay for it...). Thus I will limit myself to tweak Blogger templates and create something sober and white.  Do not be surprised when the first white page appears that its color scheme and design evolves for a few weeks until I find again something I like. I want a simple page that downloads fast and can be read easily on tablets and phones as I notice that hits from such sources are increasing. Also, when trouble comes I may have to start posting from my cell phone, the horror!

On future projects I plan to also split my Twitter in language type, maybe even starting one in French. I have observed that switching languages is even more off putting to readers than in the blog....  I plan to write shorter and shorter posts, and maybe open yet a third blog for when longer texts are needed, and also to start collecting a selection of the 4000 earlier posts. I am no journalist nor plan to turn the blog into a book because simply I have no time and it is not my vocation, at least not now. But I am tired to repeat certain types of explanations and I think a "historical blog" can fulfill both aims, to create "the book" and to offer a historical "dictionary". If well organized it will be easy to send people there.  But this is for later in the year if ever. Right now, I will limit to setting up a leaner blog, more fit for resisting the regime, that takes less time to write as time is shorter and shorter in my life with all the family and business problems that I must endure.

Thus are things. Of course, suggestions as changes happen are welcome.