Not A Blog™

As you can see from my post yesterday, I’ve finally begun updating my Not A Blog™ again after nearly three months. The recent redesign was not as successful as I had hoped, and I found that it rapidly disintegrated into exactly the sort of thing from which I had attempted to redesign it in the first place. That created a downward spiral of not-caring and so, even though I had things to say, the saying was such a hassle that nothing came of it.

During the last redesign I had ever so briefly toyed with the idea of installing the blogging software WordPress. After all, I’m paying however many dollars per month for web hosting, and my host offers this stuff for free. Like anything free, it’s not free at all because the cost is obviously factored into the cost of my webhosting. At the time I decided not to use it, because I was still capable of doing everything myself and so it must be.

Between now and then I’ve had something of a revelation. Everyone knows the cliche if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. This is true. However I have decided—and you can quote me on this—why do something yourself when you can get someone else to do it for you?

The flip side to that is that it will never come out just right. But if you’re willing to settle for good enough, it saves a lot of time. So after huge piles of queries as to the state of my Not A Blog™—and by huge piles I mean three—I decided to break down and begin using blogging software.

Overall, I’m actually pretty pleased with WordPress. The ease of updating can’t even be compared to the old, hand-crafted style. It’s awesome.

That said, I have some issues. First of all, as you can see this is more like Not So Much Not A Blog™ rather than straight up Not A Blog™. But that’s cumbersome, so despite some additions of bloggi-ness, I’m sticking with the Not A Blog™ monicker. Here’s a rundown of what’s changing and what’s staying the same.

1. Biggest change: comments. I’m only doing this because I can’t turn them off. I can make a post not able to be commented on, but I can’t actually get rid of the little thing that says “ZERO COMMENTS”. That’s just annoying. So I’m actually making the articles comment-able for now. This may or may not change without warning. Note that I’m sure there is a way to remove the comments line, I’m just entirely too unmotivated to figure it out right now. I don’t like comments, but I don’t don’t like them that much. So leave one, if you would.
2. Blogroll? Nope. This was one of those things I could “turn off”. It actually still exists; there is no way to totally turn off the blogroll. But I found that if I deleted all the links from the blogroll section of the admin page, it goes away on the site. Thankfully. I will be putting the links page back up eventually, but the word “blogroll” is retarded and I refuse to have it be a legitimate header here. Blogroll. Sounds like some sort of… web log pastry.
3. Search and archives. These are definitely for the better. The search, especially. That was always something I wanted but never mentioned because I didn’t think it would ever happen. Sniff. Now I’m all teary-eyed.
4. Topics. I guess I could still have topics. But WordPress doesn’t have topics, it has “catagories”, the idea being that you group articles into broad headings. This also assumes you write about the same things often. I don’t. Of course I have some themes: art, philosophy, laziness—but they’re not really catagories I would argue. So while it would theoretically be possible to put each article in its own catagory of whatever that article was about, that’s unwieldy. All that to say the catagories function is going to take some getting used to. (Not to mention there’s the problem of writing new uncatagorized articles. Do I make a new catagory or try to pigeon-hole it into an existing catagory? I should just assign everything to “uncatagorized” and be done with it but that helps no one.)
5. Titles. I can no longer name the titles with the date (well, I could but again, it’s cumbersome) and I don’t have the freedom to pull oh-so-clever tricks like making the year forty years in the future. Now I actually have to think of titles. I hate coming up with titles for stuff. Oh the pressure! It requires entirely too much thinking.
6. I’m almost certain there’s other stuff, too, but I don’t remember it off the top of my head as I’m typing this.

Finally, you may be wondering, what about the old material? It was the equivelent of a real-life book, I’m sure you remember.

It’s gone.

No, for real. There were classics, I know. And I might do something where I convert the old archives, but that’s unlikely. For now, I’m not sure what I’m going to do with all that stuff, so I’m just leaving it offline. Google has it archived, I’m sure; go read it there. The non-writing (videos, music, art) will probably be reappearing soon, but the writing itself is offline for now.

In conclusion, I’ve really updated the site this time. Posting is fun again because it’s not a hassle. And although the site design is not mine, this isn’t supposed to be a portfolio. There! I said it! Someone else designed this graphic designer’s site! Frankly, I have more important things to do with my time, like actually writing the content.