Call me egotistical, but according to D. Keith Robinson, I’d like to think that this new blog of mine will be A Successful Blog. Ideally, anyway.
Incidentally, Keith’s website is where I inadvertently stole my anti-tagline from. Just like I (somewhat less inadvertently) appropriated some of Dooce‘s design elements. Imitation is the highest form of flattery… right?
After all, I believe it was Picasso who said, “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” —I’m not sure what that makes me, then.
Now that my page looks kind of like a “real” blog, I find myself torn between writing more and writing better. Ideally, I’d like to do both. Realistically, I know that if I want to put out high-quality entries like The Elite Members Of The Online Blogosphere (and their groupies know who they are), I would need to sit down and spend quality time on each and every entry. I would basically be writing mini-essays for actual publication, while trying to keep my informal style intact.
It’s harder than it seems. For me, anyway.
On the other hand—shit, no one new is reading this thing. My entire audience consists of Aaron, Amy, Sheryl, Eric, Beth, Dan, and sometimes Amanda, Donna, Kristen, Ellie from SomethingNormal, or a random wanderer following a link from my sig or my old Bosstones page (which, remarkably, still gets hits after at least two years of stagnation).
There’s nobody here to impress. Y’all know me too well. *smirk*
So, once I get used to being all loose and laid-back while typing in a new interface, I’m hoping I’ll be back to my normal blogging self—albeit with a narrower column of text, a different color scheme, and a new backend.
Huh-huh, she said, “back end.” Cool.
P.S. – All of my August 2004 LJ entries are now imported into MT. w00t!
Well, I done it. I bought a domain name and pointed it toward my sparkly new web hosting service. I have also maxxed out credit card #2 with said web hosting, and made an emergency online ‘oh-shit-did-I-just-go-overlimit?’ payment. I am totally done charging shit until I get both cards back to about 50% paid-off. Why do I keep doing this shit? I’m really pissing myself off with this.
But I digress. Web hosting.
As much as I would love to set up MT right now, I’m getting a little tired and am having trouble following the installation instructions. How should I know where I want to install Movable Type? You’re the experts—where would you put it?!
*deep breath*
I’m just really anxious to get my shit going, even though my navigation isn’t quite up to par yet. I think I need to try a couple different templates for horizontal navigation, and maybe set it up so it doesn’t look like crap with a space there, in case I can’t get rid of it. Kind of like my issue with the fixed background—it looks in both IE and Firefox, even though it looks totally different.
I wish I had more quality brain-time in the evenings. I’ve still got a good hour of awakeness, but my brain is done. All I’m good for at this point is some TV, a shower, a chapter or two of Lord of the Rings, and hitting the sack. Blah.
Thanks to the lovely folks at the CSS Forum, I now have my basic layout set up as I had wanted. I still need to design my very first masthead, figure out my site structure and navigation (i.e. pare this sucker down), and finish my background image to my satisfaction. Then, and only then, will I be prepared to shell out some coin for “real” webhosting. And, after that, I will refamiliarize myself with installing perl scripts on a remote server (which actually shouldn’t be too hard—I mean, if I could install a guestbook script back in the day, I can certainly install and configure Movable Type six years later).
Questions, though: Amy, I know you use Firefox. When you scroll my test page, does the “transparent” background kind of jump? I think it’s just a video RAM issue on my box, but I can’t be positive. It does the same thing in Netscape 7.2 (which I downloaded for testing purposes only). The only reason it doesn’t do it in IE6 is that Explorer is fubar and doesn’t display the background properly… but I kind of like the funky effect it gives, so I’m keeping it, even though it’s not what I was going for. Oh, and incidentally… Firefox is now my default browser.
Overall, I believe I am pleased. Any comments on the layout: good, bad, ugly? I’ll get the masthead up as soon as I get it designed. 😉
Interesting evening. The original plan had been:
1.) do yoga while watching local news
2.) eat dinner during national news
3.) brush teeth, practice mellophone
4.) water plants, indoors and out
5.) put clean clothes away and other minor straightening-up
6.) play with new website
The actual plan became:
1.) super-hungry. ate dinner during local news.
2.) watched half of national news, then fell asleep.
3.) came downstairs at 7:15pm. turned on computer.
4.) messed with website for two hours.
Finally got it to look almost right in Explorer, but (as Amy will notice) it looks totally fubar in Firefox. ARRGH! WTF?! I enjoy a good intellectual puzzle, don’t get me wrong, but I am getting seriously peeved at this.
After all this tweaking, I just hope I can make Movable Type work with it OK without resorting to using one of their templates. Good gravy.