This is just a quick metapost about the new bar thing I just implemented. (That sounds so corporate. I “implemented” “processes” to “facilitate” the “conveyance” of “information”.) Whatever you want to call it, I finally figured out how to create another bar up at the top into which I can put things of my choosing. No more shall I be slave to the standards of what constitutes a blog! I am Not A Blog™!

I don’t know why I couldn’t figure it out before. Well, actually, no, that’s not true. I know what I was doing wrong—and with the utmost clarity, no less. I really need to learn to leverage the workings of my brain better. See, the first time I looked at it, it was so much PHP gibberish. I fooled around with it, but only succeeding in breaking it entirely. Then a new version of WordPress came out; I installed it, and it promptly reverted my site to the old settings—simultaneously “breaking” what I had in place and “fixing” what I had screwed up. So I let it go.

Well, I went back again to see if I could maybe try and puzzle it out. No puzzling happened. Instead, when I went to “fool around” with the code, I clicked on exactly the file I needed and scrolled down right to the exact block of code I needed to be looking at without even thinking about it. I hadn’t even really started, but there I was. The answer presented to me, wholesale. When I got to that point, I took one look at the code and said to myself, well, duh. I just have to put this over here. I did it, and it worked. In other words, my brain figured out what needed to happen all independent of me consciously thinking about it, which happens so dang much, I should know how to use it by now. I’m getting there. Suffice it to say that I love when my brain figures this stuff out by itself, leaving me to do more important things, like giggling at the latest episode of Mr. Deity.

Anyway, the point is that now there’s this little info bar up at the top that I can use to convey the sort of stupid information I used to cram into posts. Rather than apologizing in the actual post for going away and not posting, I can just put a note up there. My writing stays metadata-free. Furthermore, I got the “what I’m reading” bit back—not that I’ve had much time to do reading, lately. It’s killing me. But with that up there, it will make me read more, as I’ve said in the past, if for no other reason than it looks bad if I don’t update it every once in a while.

I’m hoping this is a major improvement, and I’m also hoping that this will be the last apologetic metapost for some time to come. I’ve never seen anyone else with this sort of thing in their blog; it just goes to support the “Not A” part.

-Ted