14 Feb
I’m emotionally spent.
The Darin blog.
I’ve resisted this for many reasons, but seeing as darinames.com serves as my official website, visited by thousands uh, hundreds hmm, dozens? As many as four or five people a month, I was not putting crooner.com to any good use. Thus beget (that’s not a typo, smartass) I decided to give this blog thing a try. I started out using iWeb from Apple. On the surface it seems like a decent entry level, WYSIWYG web authoring package. Playing around with it, however, made me realize that, yes, it does a have a very low learning curve and would easily be understood by a beginner (who actually knows how to use a computer). However, the latest version, 2.x (part of Apple’s iLife 08 suite) sports features that allows one to do things via drag and drop that would take very serious effort using the Big Boys of web editing software like Dreamweaver or GoLive. This was unexpected. The only snag is that it lacks certain things one would consider intrinsic to a blog, the most glaring being categories that can contain posts of similar subject. Still, I managed to make a decent little site that looked slick and actually garnered some comments on some of my ranting posts. Still, I wondered about the many extensible features of WordPress.
Hence, I decided to give WordPress another look.
WordPress has categories and CSS and all kinds flying out its ass. I also sports a hungry-man helping of über-geek super-coder-goodness, but I don’t want to learn a new fucking language for a friggin blog! Unless you’re willing to learn to speak fucking gobbley-goo, you’ll end up picking out one of the many WordPress themes and then simply add posts via WP’s web admin site. I don’t even know if its possible to have a QuickTime movie in the middle of a post with WP. I DO know that if it is possible, it will require the use of a third party plugin that will extend WP’s features but also require one to roll their sleeves up and plunge into the scary world of code. And that doesn’t begin to let you place the movie in any spot on the page. For that, yo need to go under the hood and wrestle with pure, unadulterated code. In iWeb, I had to resort so far as to drag the movie file from my desktop to the page I wanted it on. To make things worse, When I decided it should be in a different spot on the page, I had no choice but click on then movie (which now looks like… a movie) and drag it to the area I desired. Pretty tough, huh (if you don’t realize that was all extremely sarcastic, stop reading right now, turn away and run screaming into the night, never to return)? This is great example of some of the features that makes it easy to fall in love with iWeb.
See… I’m lucky in that I grew up in the last generation before the full-on digital explosion. Back then, knowing how to use computers and how to utilize the very, very young and mysterious “internet” thing was a highly specialized skill set. Today it’s the determining factor of whether or not you’ll be a social outcast.
That’s why I like iWeb. Apple understands that not everyone wants to write code for three days just to decide what fucking color their fucking font will be! Moreover, as other bogging tools become more complex in order to offer new features, iWeb will gain more and more of these advanced features, yet remain as easy to use as a word processor (in the case of MS Word… easier). Still, I’m going to use the WP theme you see now for a few days and see if I like it or hate it (WP, not the theme). As for the theme, this one was close to what I wanted but deserved no cigar. Luckily, two of the major changes I wanted to make, the header image up top and the groovy background pattern are just graphic files “called” upon by the code that *is* the website. But changing all text to white, having this middle section be a translucent blue gradient instead of black… I have no fucking idea where to begin. And that sucks.