I know, I know.
“But you said …” Yep, I sure did. “It’s too …” Yeah, yeah, I said that, too. And don’t forget “I want to keep it simple.” I’ll have that carved on my tombstone, if nothing else.
In the months since my last post, I’ve spent much of my free time evaluating this and that — lots and lots of this and that. I even thought at one point of doing it myself and coding it all by hand from scratch; I even put together a working website:
This site looks like a refugee from the late 90s, doesn’t it? Like it was stuck on an old 10-gig hard drive in some forgotten, dusty IBM PS/2 clone sitting in a garage somewhere for the last two decades.
As a matter of fact I had in mind a website that I had from that era — minus the gifs of laughing skulls, shimmery, glowing candles and the blood-dripping lines that were forerunners of <hr> tags today (this was in my vampire/goth/still-clinging-to-my-youth-even-though-I’m-thirty-and-should-know-better phase). There are a few tell-tales of modernity though: the copyright date and the creative commons license for one, the buy-me-a-cappuccino sticker for another — not to mention the web browser its displayed on. The “connected successfully” at the top was the PHP message letting me know I was communicating with my MySQL database, incidentally.
Anyway, the more I thought about it, the more I wanted something a little more than static HTML and PHP — as in the aforementioned database (nerd is as nerd does) — which was a little beyond what I was prepared for (as I soon found out, much to my chagrin). And the more I tried to deal with flat-file CMSes and the like (I’m too old and crotchety to learn four or five different new programming languages — one or two, sure, but four?), or tried getting beyond mid-level PHP and introductory MySQL … well, you see where this is going.
Jeez, I just wanna write, ya know?
So here we are. And in a way that seems apropos; I switched to WordPress way back in 2006 when Automattic, the company behind WordPress, pressed — heh! — forward with its trademark and logo. Not that I knew any of that that then: I just thought I would give this open-source CMS a go — it was relatively new, looked cool and relatively simple (especially compared to Drupal or the in-house content management systems I was used to — yikes!).
Me and WP, we go way back, yo.
So I know the snow has melted a while ago — officially summer is still several weeks away, but I’m already sleeping all night with the windows open and the fan on — but the site’s not quite ready yet. But soon. It’s close …