First: I think “blog” may be one of the dumbest words ever to have entered the English language. I can’t help it — it’s what everybody calls them and, this being my first one, I might as well join the crowd. (Yes, me, the technology geek, getting a blog for the first time in 2007. Perhaps I am becoming old and crotchety after all.) But you can’t make me like the word, and so if I try not to use it much, perhaps you’ll understand why.
Second, I am more than a little embarrassed that I have to use a shrinkwrapped theme for this site — I care way too much about making things beautiful to really want to do that in the least. On the other hand, a few stolen hours over the past few days are nowhere near enough to make a custom blog layout, from scratch, and translate in into whatever language is required — so I’ll do what I can, and come back and make it truly mine in the future.
Third…well, you know, blogs really are kind of cool. Especially nowadays — a little bit of jiggery-pokery, and I can take a picture with my iPhone, and, assuming I’ve actually got cell service, have it posted here within a few seconds, all with the help of Flickr, its email-based upload(e)r, its support for posting to blogs, and the MetaWeblog API. That is pretty cool, at least to me, and I plan to have quite a bit of fun with it. Granted, the camera on it is pretty bad compared to my 5D and triumvirate of lenses, but, for a cell phone, it’s really not too bad at all.
Fourth, for the technology folks out there: oh, it kills me that I couldn’t use a Rails-based blogging engine for this site, because I’m such a Rails nut…but I checked out both Typo and Mephisto, neither one of which really worked for me. Typo seemed too big, too complex, and failed some basic tests (like allowing Flickr to post to it), while Mephisto has basically gone without love for too long to be usable. (I found a plugin that got Flickr talking to it, but the posts showed up without a category…and thus on the home page.)
(Finally: can you tell I use italics way too much when I get way too tired? Bed calls. Badly.)
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