My goodness.
I think I crawled into the dungeon that was my blog a few weeks ago, and I’m only now stumbling out into the real world again.
When I came back from Texas the first thing that happened was that I promptly got ill no more than 3 hours after I got off the plane, then started projectile vomiting while my head spun 360 degrees the next morning. Needless to say that alone put me out of commission for a few days. I finally got better just in time to go back to work again, where I was faced with a workload that was backlogged oddly enough, for exactly the length of time that I’ve been gone. Hmmmmmm…
Then we started doing training for the new system that we’ll using soon, nicknamed Charlie Foxtrot, which right there tells you all you need to know about what’s coming. Just how bad is this system you ask? You ever seen the movie Terminator, where the computer Skynet becomes self-aware at 2:14AM, and the world promptly goes straight to hell shortly afterward?
This is worse.
On top of that, my blog kept going down in flames, so I kept trading emails with support, who assured me the server was fine and that basically my blog sucked. I had to believe it, because the code driving my site was already 3 years old and bloated to begin with. My home page alone made 372 connections every time it loaded. It was time for a major change, a change I really couldn’t put off any longer.
After doing extensive research on themes for WordPress, so many that my eyes started glazing over after viewing a gaboolion demos, I finally settled on a theme framework called Headway, which is about as close to a WYSIWYG theme builder as you’ll ever find on the WordPress platform. The next few weeks involved a lot of banging my head against solid objects, tearing my hair out and excessive bouts of crying. I had to re-learn CSS, learn about the use of “hooks,” learn about PHP functions and other alien terminology that almost made me say sod all and sign up for a Blogger account. I persevered though, dropping the plugins that were bloating my site, restructuring the layouts and slowly putting together a completely revamped backend and frontend.
Alas however, I am sad to say my smileys are no more. :-( The plugin that drove the display of all my smileys was simply creating too much of a bottleneck for my site, so after nearly 5 years of making toothy grins to all my visitors and readers, it was finally time to let them go.
On the upside though, I’ve managed to lay in a tumblelog within my regular blogging, something I’ve always wanted to do, but just didn’t know quite how I wanted to set it up until now. For those of you who don’t know what a tumblelog is, it’s basically a quick and dirty way to microblog content to your site, usually in the form of photos, videos, audio, and text snippets that are shorter than a normal blog post, but not normally short enough to fit within Twitter. I always felt like my blogging was stunted by the feeling that I had to write something a bit lengthy for it to be considered blogworthy, and that feeling often precluded me from posting quick thoughts or content relating to an experience I had while traveling. Sometimes Twitter did the trick. Oftentimes however, I needed something a little more.
It forced me to do some soul searching and re-evaluate my approach to blogging, and as a result I made even more dramatic changes to my blog’s taxonomies. My category names have been changed to be more descriptive and easier to understand, and I drastically reduced the amount of tags I was using in posts, from about 5,000 tags to now about 400. I read somewhere that you really don’t need more than 3-5 tags per post, and yet somehow I had gotten the idea over the years that the more tags I used, the merrier. That’s why some posts of mine would have nigh on 30 tags to them. I just didn’t know better.
It got to the point where I dreaded blogging at times simply because I didn’t want to put up with wracking my brain for appropriate tags to use on my posts. Stupid. That I no longer have to emphasize them so much comes as a huge relief to me.
In addition, I’ve also laid down the groundwork for a fictional sub-blog that I’ll be writing soon. It won’t overtly appear like it’s fictional (that’s part of the fun), but it will be entirely the work of my imagination, as I seek to resurrect a character I’ve once written about in the past, a man who will once again go forth and vex humanity beyond reason, much to me (and hopefully my readers) delight.
Eventually, it will be three blogs in one. My prose will change dramatically as a result, indeed, just by virtue of no longer using emoticons it’s changed already. But for the first time in a long time, I’m excited. I actually have the desire to write again, and this time with virtually none of the roadblocks that’s stopped me before. It’s like getting a new lease on life.
In the meantime, let me know what you think of the new layout. I’m anxious to get some feedback, and any reports of quirky behavior or bugs you might be seeing as a result the new design.
Thanks for sticking with me as I continue to evolve my blogging. At long last I can finally go to bed again before 4AM. :-)
Oh, and by the way, during all this, my host guy emails me and says “my bad,” turns out the server was having problems after all, and that my blog had nothing to do with it. There’s going to be a flaming paper bag burning outside his door this weekend.
