Blogging Exploration

For the last week or so, I think I've actually been up for the majority of the time between when I get up in the afternoon and when I go to bed. This is a pretty good improvement over spending almost the entire last year in bed. Being up mostly consists of sitting at the computer surfing the Web, but I think I can revive the going outside and walking around the yard for a few minutes every few days.

I've been totally distracted by Lara's new template so I started looking again at what is available for bloggers. There are not a lot of templates available for Blogger Layouts, so I actually played around with porting a WordPress theme to Blogger, which turns out to not be too difficult if you are a programmer. This also shows that my brain is working better. The first pass, though not completely done, has taken a few days (in the chronic fatigue measure of days). It would probably have been even faster if I had decided to read and look up things in a CSS manual and the Blogger help pages first, instead of figuring out how they work from the code.

This was more of a technical exercise since I don't know if I actually want to use the template. And then I contemplated using WordPress itself, since a lot of good things have been said about it, and it sounds interesting technically. However, I found that a lot of the customization features and the nifty features for a developer aren't accessible through the free hosted WordPress.com, only if you host the open source WordPress software elsewhere. Anyway, my biggest complaint about WordPress sites is that the pages load very slowly.

This seems to be a good time to try cleaning up my blog too. After a few years, it seems cluttered. And since becoming sick, it seems to have taken on multiple personalities and new subject categories. I've contemplated having separate blogs for different subjects. That would also be a hack for getting two dimensions of labeling. I started trying to clean up my labels, to reduce the number of labels and reduce labeling posts with multiple labels. From this effort, I have ended up with more instead of fewer labels. And found that my writing seems to have been better before.

Hrm.... hierarchical labels would be nice. Yeah, I don't understand one-dimensional labels and tags. Because, if they had the ability to be nested or hierarchical, you could still use them one-dimensionally if you wanted to, but if you wanted more dimensions, you could do that too. I have to try to adapt my labeling behavior to the available technology, rather than what should be the other way around.

During this process, I also visited some random blogs and found some very interesting stuff. The blog world is evolving. More photography, better templates, group blogs, and just a lot of people writing. Too many blogs to read. It's interesting, as we seek more reading material and art from sources that are less "official" or authoritative. There are fabulous writers, artists, and people with interesting stories everywhere.