Month: April 2005

I’ve been writing summaries, partially for my own selfish use on my home page.

is that whole “in which the author” thing too annoying?

(silence will be taken as a no. ;))

it’s pretty late now, and I haven’t written already today, so I suppose it’s about time. I feel disjointed in my life, but I don’t really feel like writing about that now. I could also write about the cats (Pico kept bringing “mr. spidey” over while we were watching a movie, wanting desperately to be played with), but I’m not much for that, either. tomorrow, hopefully, I’ll have a photo of my new CD shelf, once it’s built, but it’s not done now.

I’m really sincerely tempted to comment on the whole WordPress search-engine-gaming foofurah…I’m so far outside of any “community” that almost certainly no one will care what I have to say, but I kinda want to say it anyway!

Okay, so here’s my take. Matt (WTF is his last name, anyway?) is an apparently nice young man who is the leader of the WordPress project. He took money from an outfit and/or individual to host articles specifically designed to draw search engine traffic, to make money for them. To complete the linkage for the project, he added a set of hidden links to the WordPress home page; the technique is used by both those seeking to draw disproportionate search engine traffic, and by those using high-end CSS design methods. That’s the summary of the situation.

Some people are willing to pile on for the sake of piling on. Others are willing to defend Matt to the death.

Me? I think he did something insanely stupid. I think he knew it, too…why else hide the links? But he wanted to try it, for whatever reasons, and…

eh. I like what Shelley’s been saying about it, even if it has been radically misinterpreted, so go read her stuff.

I’m going to keep using WordPress, for all the reasons that I’ve been using it all along, and which have nothing to do with whether Matt is a nice guy. (I am sort of with the guy (in Shelley’s comments?) who said he was reconsidering the link to wordpress.org, though. I don’t like feeling used that way.)

here’s the other thing that bothers me: WordPress, and wordpress.org, aren’t just Matt, but all of the other developers, who have, one gathers, been pretty supportive. but one also gathers that they weren’t aware of this beforehand. that doesn’t seem right somehow, not that I can quite articulate how yet.

but this is turning out to be similar to pretty much everyother attempt I’ve made to pontificate on issues that float about this little world o’ mine…not too good. [sigh]

ah, the blank page. only now it’s not entirely blank…whereas the written page gets out of the way, so to speak, with only the lines or spiral wire, this is always a framework of how on top of the meat of what.

I have been thinking a lot about words at work, as I get more into driving everything towards templates ($DEITY bless WordPress), and worrying less about what it looks like and more what it says.

and at the same time, I am trying to be more imaginative, more inventive, in my visual design. after all, I got to this design thing sort of backwards: words first, the pretty stuff later. I’m quite aware of my struggles with creating beauty. it’s a lot like my struggles with music, when I was younger; I can get there with a lot of practice, but it never really flows.

unlike music, though, I enjoy practicing.

when I was packing up things in my (home) office a couple of weeks ago, I found a stack of sheet music, and realized that I actually wasn’t sure anymore how to turn those symbols into sounds. I was so overwhelmed that I just about burst into tears.

actually, I had a couple of moments of almost-tears that day, sorting through things I hadn’t looked at in a while. there’s something emotionally….insane? intense? about keeping all the letters and photos and whatnot that I’ve managed to hold onto all these years. (ha! all these years, as though I were 80. though I hestitate to think about Grandma Nelson, and her cache of _stuff_ — for lack of a better term — as I consider my boxes.) at the very least, I’m gripped by overwhelming nostalgia and memory when I flip through a box of postcards.

for several years, I collected postcards; my favorites went up on the “Wall O’ Women” — they were mostly women I admired or thought lovely, or art of women, that sort of thing. I took down the last Wall O’ Women, I think, when we moved out of the studio apartment that had been mine along and into that tiny apartment in the old cut-up house. (I should find the poem about that building.) I haven’t put it up since, and in most of that 7 (?!) years, the whole collection has been stuffed into a box.

I went through them, looking for visual inspiration for this thing, something I could repurpose to design my site. now I’m keeping them in a wooden box on my desk so I can flip through them more often, and maybe one of these days I’ll come up with a good way to display them again.

there’s another piece to that story, which I’ve been mulling over since then, but I actually need to run right now. I might come back to it later; that all depends.

(on what? — mostly, on where I am with myself, and writing about myself…which is by way of being coy, I suppose.)