The New Thing

So.

Here I am more than a month later with a WordPress blog with comments and all that new-fangled stuff. What took me so long? Well, partially I found myself at the time I went on hiatus just plain crazy busy. Which I still am.

Partially I was also feeling, for reasons I don’t clearly recall any longer, very irritated with blogging. I think there were some discussions going about a month ago which annoyed me and I’ve long since learned that writing online when you’re feeling really irascible is a bad idea. I think at least some of it was various entries about Andrea Dworkin’s death. I think I needed a bit of a blog vacation.

But a lot of it was simply that I wanted to learn CSS and do my own WordPress theme and not feel just completely clueless about what was going on underneath the hood. Many many people keep telling me this is easy. Well, I don’t think it is. Yes, just setting up a plain old Kubrick-theme blog is not so hard, though I suspect I’m going to find out I screwed up something even in the basic administrative set-up. But doing a theme of your own? Holy crow. Yes, I readily understand conceptually all the many advantages to CSS but it is, at least for me, vastly more difficult to use than clunky old HTML. I can’t even figure out how to put images up anywhere here, let alone really customize it. There’s a modest local difficulty here also with my gaining access to the shell directories where this thing lives that’s probably soluable once we get past the chaos of the semester.

So I apologize for the plain-Jane look, but I wanted to get back online and blogging again. It’ll be interesting finally having comments: I’m a bit nervous about it, as one of the main motivations I took into blogging was to get away from the call-and-response rhythms of asychronous conversation in my own online writing.

This entry was posted in Blogging. Bookmark the permalink.

13 Responses to The New Thing

  1. ebehren1 says:

    Up-n-atem!

    So, do you want help with the design/CSS stuff, or do you want the opportunity to hack at things on your own, at your own pace?

  2. ogged says:

    Welcome back. Learning CSS makes it *much* easier to learn CSS again when you decide to redesign your site.

  3. slolernr says:

    Welcome back.

  4. Indeed, welcome back! Looks like summer has arrived.

  5. Caleb says:

    Congratulations on the new digs! Great to have you back.

  6. Ralph says:

    Great to see that the new site is up and to see you posting again, Tim.

  7. I’ll be honest: I like “plain Jane” designs. Elegant simplicity, wabi-sabi and all that…. Don’t change it on my account. Welcome back.

  8. Good to have you back. Great new backend for the blog.

  9. Rob says:

    Welcome back. The site looks good. I hope you get good comments: you deserve them.

  10. john theibault says:

    As Rob says: welcome back and I hope you get good comments. The prospect is enough to get me to login, even though I mostly avoid participating in sites where I have to register to join in the discussion. I note that Ralph has yet to note your return at Cliopatria. And you must have had quite a backlog of things to talk about, judging from how many posts you already have here!

  11. john theibault says:

    So I did. Oh dear, an inaccuracy in my very first post.

Comments are closed.