this blog of mine

My nonsense is now even more convenient

I’ve finally added an RSS link on the sidebar of the site. It should work in your favourite (or even most-hated) RSS reader, making it easier than ever to keep up with whatever rolls around in my noggin and ends up on this site. It’s like the Year 2000 all over again!

RSS link

This coincides with me trying to find another RSS reader myself and maybe stick to it. It could happen!

Also, this seems like a good random post to update on how I was looking into other options for my blog after all the WordPress drama of the past year or so. It turns out that trying to break out of a 20-year habit is hard (I started this blog on WordPress in 2005). And I always found something I didn’t like in the alternatives. But I am still looking in a casual kind of way, part of it being driven by the curiosity of what else is out there now for blogging.

I have once again mucked around with the colours on the site

Why? Because I can.

I also wanted to have a warmer look that is less business-like/bland. For reference (change is inevitable), it currently looks like this:

This may look different by the time you read this!

I’ve been reading a lot about old-timey blogs of yore lately, and the nostalgia hits hard. I don’t want to fully embrace all the sometimes questionable aesthetics of that era (late 90s, early 2000s) by having busy backgrounds, random MIDI files tooting on the home page and so on, but some actual colour might be nice.

Inevitably, I retreat from these changes and may do so again, but for now, enjoy a little green and yellow instead of the more standard blue and white.

Post 31 for July 2025

I don’t know why I posted so little this month. If I hadn’t been running and birding regularly, I’d have barely posted at all!

As often, I did crank out a bunch of posts right at the end of the month to at least get an average of one-per-day. I will reflect on my lack of gumption or whatever it is, and see if things change in August. If not, then I’ll just post lots of AI slop1!

  1. OK, I probably won’t. I won’t. I promise. Not even AI dogs playing poker. ↩︎

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.