Disgressed

I’ve been doing a refurbishment of Conscious Entities recently; a nice new widgetised theme that is fully up-to-date and looks good; a new dynamic blogroll which is far better than a dull set of title links, and the addition of a front-page display of recent comments, all good stuff. In addition, I will now gradually bring over all the old content into the blog, in effect sweeping up some of the mess left over from when I actually moved to WordPress. Some old posts that have been absent ever since then will eventually reappear and then I may be in the position where I can use redirects so that the old hand-coded html stuff is no longer seen. I can’t get rid of those pages altogether because some of them remain among the most popular pages on the site.

Sorry about that geeky outburst; what I meant to explain was how I’ve gradually become fond of WordPress.  When I first contemplated blogifying the site I knew very little about the different options and I could easily have gone for one of the other options; but I’m glad I didn’t.

One of the things I like about the internet is the way you can get into the technical aspects gradually. It was a revelation to me when I first discovered that you could see the code for any page on the internet, copy it, muck about with it, slap it back in your browser and see what happened. This kind of idle tinkering was how I picked up enough html to start cobbling a site together by hand (and how I completely failed to pick up any knowledge or concern for prescribed standards).

WordPress sort of facilitates a similar gradual approach. You can use a hosted blog and never look under the bonnet; but if you want to host your own and choose a theme, you can do that too.  You really have to add your own masthead graphic. Then the temptation to fire up the editor and change a few variables, colours, fonts, spacing, and so on, is irresistible.  You can do a surprising amount without great difficulty; you randomly lob in a php file from a different template and lo: it works!  Let’s just snip some of that code there that looks as if it does this and see if it will do that…

Sorry. What really amused me yesterday that there was a particular feature I wanted and I couldn’t see how to do it. I started googling and visiting likely places for advice, and it turned out some woman had been on the forums and asked for advice on exactly the same point a year ago. She didn’t get a proper answer: I looked at the next possible place to find advice and she’d been there, too. I ended up following what must have been almost exactly the same path she had followed a year before. She got unhelpful advice, advice that was correct but not really what she wanted, and incomprehensible advice (I’m no css expert, but I’m pretty sure that some of this was actually just wrong).  At last I came across a post from her where she happily explained that now she’d found the answer – and luckily she said where.

The thing is, you can avoid techie details altogether if you like, or you can spend days writing up your own hand-crafted plugins. Or, if you’re like me, you can occasionally indulge in a little bit of fiddly customisation and then stop while it still works…