Nothing Was Delivered

Okay, generally I don’t like “meta”. I guess I ‘m just not Post Modern enough to appreciate infinite regression. Mostly because it’s horribly self indulgent. I’ll save this for another post where I drive myself insane by going double-meta.

But let me indulge for a minute with a blog post about blogging. Like everyone in the world, I’ve used Twitter, Facebook, and even Myspace before. Also, I’ve been up on Walking English for years, using Blogspot. But when I wanted to try something a bit more long form, I looked back at Blogspot and it didn’t really feel cut out for the job. It still looks like it did in 2004.

I had heard about WordPress before and have seen some impressive blogs on the service. The templates looked cleaner. So basically I had a drink and said “what the hell?”

First impressions are good. I like the templates. There are still ones with garish colors or weird formatting. People are always going to demand stupid. But the simples ones don’t look empty. They look clean and uncluttered without feeling cheap and amateurish. They’re black and white without feeling colorless.

There’s a lot going on behind the scenes. There are a lot of ways you can customize your blog. Pages, polls, widgets, feedbacks, and more. Honestly it’s kind of confusing as to what sidebar does what. Having that power there is nice, but can be a little intimidating at first. Luckily, the defaults look fine, so I don’t feel like I have to spend time tweaking settings.

Lots of bells and whistles, but they stay out of the way pretty well. Enough so that you focus less on the meta and more on the blogging.

I wanted to do something special with the first post here. It’s exciting, right? A new blog. A virtual tabla rasa. I thought I should celebrate. Like at the grand opening of a car wash.

I tried to get balloons, but I want this blog to be environmentally responsible, and the balloons could float away and kill a seagull or something.

I considered a cheese and cracker tray, but what about lactose and gluten intolerant readers?

I thought about clowns, but they’re terrifying.

I even looked into having a characacher artist, but when I Googled how to spell that word (slippery little devil), I found that apparently there are web sites that’ll do it for you, but they’re goofy. Not exactly the tone I wanted to set.

So you’re left with this post. It’s not much to speak about. No fancy font. No embedded video.  It probably has some spelling errors. But it gets the ball rolling, and that’s something.