this blog of mine

Should I go retro?

I’m mulling another redo of this blog’s look and I’m thinking of going all-in on retro. Not in a crazy way, like trying to simulate the <blink> tag or embedding MIDI samples, but something a little warmer, less corporate-looking.

I shall mull things like colour choices, fonts and assorted bits of whimsy. The downside of this is I am not a programmer and can’t just whip up some fancy CSS using my big brain, so the process will be slow, painful, etc. But possibly worth it.

I could do things like change from a basic white background. But should I?

I will ponder.

So long, doodlingsandnoodlings.com!

For a time I had the idea of a more purpose-driven blog and out of that I secured the domain for doodlings and noodlings.com.

I never used it, and I am passing on the opportunity to renew it, so anyone else who wants it, go get it!

The idea seemed sound at the time:

  • Take my two main creative interests, writing and drawing, and combine them into a blog that would showcase each.
  • I could use lots of old material to get the site rolling, so I wouldn’t immediately need to create new content.
  • I could opine about writing/art in general to “fill in the gaps”.

There were a few problems, though:

  • The URL, though kind of catchy, is long. Also, I could never remember if it was doodlings andnoodlings or noodlingsanddoodlings. This didn’t seem like a good sign.
  • My brain doesn’t seem to like being restricted to just a few topics, which is why this blog (creolened.com) covers anything that pops into my head.
  • I think part of me just wanted to do something more “worthy” than rambling about random things.

In the end, I realized I was not going to seriously pursue the site and chose to let the domain expire. It’s also why, as we start May 2025, I have not yet moved off of WordPress, despite a desire to unhitch from a platform that is apparently running largely based on the whims of a single person with, uh, interesting views.

I’m still not entirely ready to start up something new, but I will let the ideas just appear organically or something–which may mean never. And if it’s never, I can live with that.

Looks like I’ll be spamming a lot of posts soon

I am way behind on my two-posts per day minimum (which is an arbitrary number I made up, but my blog, my rules). Let’s do the math:

  • There are 31 days in March, so two posts per day = 62
  • As of this post, I have written 31
  • This means I must write 31 more
  • After today, there are four days left in the month
  • If you divide 31 by 4, you get 7.75

I must write 7.75 posts every day for the rest of March.

I’m not sure if I can do it this month, for reasons.

But I’ll try.

Font (no longer huge) Awesome

There was a recent update to the Official™ Font Awesome plugin, and I was excited, because I like icons and glyphs and other weird non-verbal forms of communication. However, when I tried inserting Font Awesome icon of a cat (of course), I discovered it was very big. Like, taking up half the screen of a 27″ monitor big.

I noticed you could adjust the size, so I adjusted the size way down. This seemed to have no effect.

I was sad.

But today there was an update and I think it’s been fixed. I’ll test this below by clogging up the rest of this post with Font Awesome icons! Or maybe just one. Or two.

This is the cat I originally tried posting:

And now, the yin-yang symbol. It spins! I think.

Here is a larger version of the cat, now in orange:

Exciting times here on the ol’ blog. Carry on with your day, if you can!

Blogging is for teenage girls crying in their bedrooms

Or so said Ben Werdmuller’s university employer.

I just love this very specific and absurd description of blogging and who it’s for.

I blog because I like writing, I like rambling, and I occasionally even have thoughtful or interesting and possibly witty things to say.

And what better place to say these things than on something I have direct control over? No one can come up to me here and say, “You’re not a teenage girl and you’re not even crying. What are you doing, you huge poser?” Well, technically, someone could say this, but I disabled comments on this blog years ago due to a bot problem I was disinclined to invest the time to resolve, since only bots wanted to comment.

Hopefully those bots are out there, somewhere, crying mechanical tears. And possibly blogging about it in binary code.

I’m feeling weird about fonts lately

I have tweaked some of the fonts on the site again (but not all of them, so there is a bit of a crazy quilt effect going on here).

Specifically:

Body font: JetBrains Mono

Heading 2 font (used for post titles): Ubuntu Mono

As an added bonus for me, because WP doesn’t “see” JetBrains Mono in the editor, it is using Bold Segoe UI at 17px instead.

I’m all about the monospaced fonts. For now. For today. We’ll see what happens tomorrow.

EDIT: I have already changed the Header font to Barlow Semi Condensed, mere minutes later.

EDIT 2: I've now changed the sidebar to JetBrains Mono and also made the background colour of the site blue, and the sidebar a greenish-yellow. Or a yellowish-green.

EDIT 3: I've updated the blue in the logo to make it a bit lighter and it seems WP just needed to cache the fonts, as the editor now shows JetBrains Mono, as nature intended. More tweaking undoubtedly to come.

Happy 20th birthday to this blog!

I knew I should have set a reminder. 😛

It was 20 years ago yesterday that I made my first post on this blog, creolened.com. Here it is in link form and as a quote in its entirety:

I was the last one to get bell bottom jeans in grade 5 and now I’m the last person on the Internet to have a blog. Hooray for me! As you may have guessed, I am using WordPress for my blogging needs. An apparent feature of WordPress is relentless self-promotion as witnessed by the three separate links for the software on this very page. I’ll be culling a few soon and adding some other links that might prove interesting or not.

Yes, blogs were seemingly cool back in 2005. And they are again! WordPress was new and was exactly what I wanted.

Today I am pondering moving away from it, because it’s both way more than I need, and it’s being run by a man with, uh, let’s say a few issues.

But in whatever form, the blog will continue. A lot has changed in the 20 years since I started writing here (5,498 posts ago, counting this one). I have less hair. I started running. I’ve had an IV stuck in my arms for 11 days. I’ve been to Nashville.

We’ve had three U.S. presidents, one of them especially terrible and literally trying to usher in both the end of democracy and the rise of fascism. So that’s fun.

In Canada, we’ve gone from Conservative minorities to Liberal minorities and our best bet is maybe another Liberal minority.

The world is hotter and stormier than in 2005. Aliens still haven’t saved us. Everything is, of course, more expensive. The internet is a pit of hell controlled by tech oligarchs who want everything they can get their hands on, but mostly power, money and control. It’s kind of bleak.

But some things haven’t changed, such as my capacity to ramble. Here’s to years more of that.

And, of course, cats:

Will I write 22 posts tomorrow?

This would ensure1I can never remember if I should use “ensure” or “insure” I maintain my average of two blog posts per day (62 for the month of January), an arbitrary metric I settled on a few years ago to keep the ol’ writing juices flowing. Don’t ask what’s in writing juice.

The answer is very likely no. But it would be kind of amazing to see what I’d write over the course of those 22 posts.

I must conclude this post with typing cat.