It would appear that if a computer keyboard is within reach of my insane fingers, I will meddle with the theme of this blog. Given a little reflection, it seems the years of studying, industry experience and hard bitten cynicism were eventually intended to service my Wordpress theme fiddling problem.
It’s terrible. I have the knowledge to build Wordpress (many moons ago I did just that – and I expect none of my readers will know too much about that) – and yet I spend spare moments tinkering. No grand plans and projects for me – if given the opportunity I won’t so much as start building the next Apollo 11, as make sure all the wheelnuts on the rocket tractor are shiny.
It’s pretty bad, isn’t it.
In other news I’m sat here – just gone 10pm GMT in the UK – listening to a band I found called “Owl City”. I discovered them quite randomly the other day. Calling “them” a “band” is something of a misnomer. It’s one very talented guy and his computer. Sounds good though. It’s on now… except of course you can’t hear it because (a) you’re not here, and (b) you’re probably reading this hours or days after I went to bed.
I’m trying hard not to think about theme fiddlage, honest. I know “fiddlage” isn’t a real word, before the English police jump on me. It’s quite a responsibility you know – maintaining language standards – especially when you are English, and expected to write and speak your native tongue wonderfully.
I’m no Shakespeare.
Heh. This is an achievement – I’ve written an appallingly constructed post that has no real subject, no direction, and no point. That’s got to be worth something hasn’t it ?
I don’t quite know why I chose the mustard theme. It seemed like a good idea at the time. On reflection, it was pretty crap, wasn’t it. Awful in fact. I suspect a few kind words were said by those who quietly had their fingers down their throat.
You will no doubt notice the “Subminimal” theme that I hand wrote is back, while I search for something better.
I’m actually wondering what useful purpose the sidebar serves. I could probably remove the entire thing, and put the content into pages. That would allow the main articles to be bigger.
Of course 99% of this reasoning takes the blog closer to Depo Masthead – a theme I have liked for a long time.
On reflection, my hand made theme isn’t too bad at all – it just needs a bit of work on the sidebar to make it presentable… and maybe increase the leading and font size of the main articles…
It’s all change again for my personal blog – gone with the minimalist theme, and in with the loud, in your face theme. I would like to say this was all planned, but of course it wasn’t. During a fit of “what can I do next” last night, I ended up looking at the free themes over at WooThemes, and came away with this one – it’s called “Mainstream” if you are insterested in slapping it on your wordpress install.
I’m not sure that it’s any easier or more difficult to read than previous incarnations of “Cheese and Beans”, but at least it mixes things up a little. I guess I got bored with the blog being mundane.
Better to be “something” rather than “something of nothing”. Feel free to tear into me, and accuse me of being a serial tinkerer (I’ll freely admit to it).
At some point over the coming weekend I promise to begin writing “real, proper” posts again – instead of these self interested sidenotes about all manner of geekery.
It’s about time I caught my few remaining readers (thankyou for your perseverence, by the way) up on happenings in our menagerie.
For some unknown reason (and remember this is a professional software developer and web designer talking) the web server this installation of wordpress is sat on will no longer let me upload files.
What. The. Hell.
To be honest, I don’t have time to fiddle with it, and I’m not sure I can really be bothered to do so. Standby for the entire contents of this damn blog to move elsewhere… the RSS feed will remain the same, and the domain name will… the platform may well be ripped out from underneath itself though. I’m sick of this.
I’ve been using posterous to throw thoughts into this blog for a while now. It’s a clever system that lets you publish to multiple places off the back of one email. I played with it some months ago, and walked away – then in a fit of laziness started using it again late last year. It seemed almost magical that I could send one email, and have my content automagically appear on Wordpress, LiveJournal, Tumblr, Facebook, Blogger, Flickr, Delicious, and any number of other sites.
There are a few reasons I’m packing it in – most of them technical – but some of them practical too. Quite apart from it generating horrible markup from Google Mail, throwing the content I generate out across multiple platforms is diluting my readership. I realised while reading one of Guy Kawasaki’s “Holy Kaw” posts yesterday how annoying it is that he forces readers through several portal pages before you reach content. I didn’t like it at all, and then realised that it’s exactly what I’ve been doing.
If you had happened upon one of my blog posts on Facebook, the link would have taken you to posterous, not Wordpress. That was pretty stupid of me. I’m not trying to track readers, but I would like to think people can find their way back to me if they liked something I wrote – if my writing is appearing all over the place, then it’s difficult for them to do that.
I seem to have created accounts everywhere, and now I’m not sure what I might do with them. I’ll probably kill off posterous entirely. I’ll keep Tumblr because the community is fantastic, and I’ll keep LiveJournal for the same reason.
I’m good at causing chaos, aren’t I…