Circuses

I’ve been staring at WordPress themes all day, I think my eyeballs are going to fall out of my head and my brains are about to spill out of my ears.

I knew that working on a blog site was going to be a big responsibility, but jeez Louise, if I have to look at one more cascading style sheet I think I’m going to lose my mind!

I remember when web site design was only done in HTML. Not that I did any actual coding myself. I got into it during the first days of WYSIWYG software – I used Dreamweaver when it was still owned by Macromedia! I thought it was fantastic – I was creating these stunning looking sites without knowing a single lick of code. That is, of course, until I started applying some detailed graphic design principles to my sites. The software wouldn’t let me move stuff over a pixel and a half like I wanted, but instead jumped everything halfway across the page. So I asked my brother (total computer nerd) why wasn’t it doing what I wanted it to do and he checked the backend for me. It turned out that the whole thing was creating the ugliest code you could possibly imagine. I won’t go into details but I will say one word – tables.

So, many years later, I’m back at site design again, but from a completely different angle. Trying to put together a site that will organize my blog posts into something cohesive and attractive.

But, there’s more to blogging than just the site design, obviously. Another thing that’s been on my mind lately has been frequency – how often should I post. I’ve been conducting a lot of research and I can’t seem to find a definitive answer given my particular circumstances. If I were a sales based blog, my frequency would be a no brainer – “as often as possible.” But, because I’m a creative blog, it sort of changes the rules. They say you’re not supposed to blog every day, but once a week should be fine. All it means is that I’m going to have to make up my own damn mind about it. Figures.

The truth is, though, I like posting every day. Sure, it’s stressful as hell and I usually don’t know what the heck I’m going to write until I sit down at the keyboard and just start typing, but I really do enjoy it. I love the pressure – it reminds me of my old job at the local TV station where we had to put on a live newscast every night at 5:00. No matter what you did or didn’t do those cameras turned on at 5:00 and the train left the station for its daily 55-minute trip come “hell or high water.” Quite literally “hell or high water”, too, because if the power went out, or there was a natural disaster, they had battery backups connected to every computer and a backup generator, the kind hospitals do, so that meant that no matter what they could still broadcast news to the people who really needed it. Kind of makes the whole thing seem sort of noble, doesn’t it?

I can’t say that my daily blog is here for a noble cause (though, I, too, have a battery backup, so, at least I’ve got that going for me), but I can say that it is a work in progress. Even if I’m not sure of the design and I’m still working on content and frequency, there’s one thing that I’m absolutely certain of. The whole purpose of this blog is to become a better writer. Other than that, it’s all just one big day at the circus.