this blog of mine

This blog hatched 19 years ago today (February 2, 2005)

woman using smartphone and laptop
It’s a blog, see? Photo by Plann on Pexels.com

Yes, I have been rambling on, making lists and dissing Apple on this blog for 19 years. My blog can now legally drink in BC.

Here’s the original post in image form:

You can see the actual post here: Bloggity blog blog

As a first post, it’s not exactly riveting. I’m still using WordPress, though.

Some fun facts from 2005:

  • Twitter did not exist (just like today)
  • Facebook did not exist1Actually, it did, it launched in 2004, but it didn’t open up to the general public until 2006
  • Instagram did not exist
  • Spotify did not exist
  • Social media did exist, but it was stuff like Friendster and Myspace
  • YouTube launched
  • Steve Jobs still existed, but we were still two years away from the iPhone
  • Donald Trump being president was still just a joke on The Simpsons, a cruel, cruel joke
  • People were using Windows XP because it was actually current
  • The most popular song of 2005 was Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together”, which I have no recollection of
  • The top movie was Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
  • An actual comedy was in the top 10. Like, a movie you see in theatres (Wedding Crashers, at #6)

For the 20th anniversary, I will get my blog a cake and then eat all of it.

More things to look at (a small site update)

I have finally added back the ability to view some of my photo galleries in the right sidebar (currently a few birding galleries, one of planes, and a trio from hiking in the days of yore). I am going to redo this shortly because the current design will quickly become unwieldy, but worry not, the new design will be both more compact and expansive. I will defy the laws of physics!

I also added back the Angry Carrot vs. Quirky Bastards comic. The bonus material page has been tweaked a bit with some better shots. Check it out for your early 2000s web comic/game mashup needs.

Change is in the hair

a vintage typewriter
I like this because you can’t actually blog with a typewriter (kids, ask your parents about typewriters). Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels.com

I never had a lush head of fulsome hair, though when I was younger I grew it out to present the illusion that I did, most obviously during my Robert Plant hair phase, my own Stairway to Hairven1I won’t apologize for this, but I will promise never to use it again.. I first got my hair cut short for a play in 1983. It was set during WWI (“Oh What a Lovely War!”) and I had multiple small roles, most of which were soldiers or other military men. Most military men in 1918 did not have Robert Plant hair, so off it came.

I liked the look and my hair was kept shorn thereafter, until that fateful day in 2011 when I decided to remove it entirely before male pattern baldness could.

But this post isn’t actually about my hair, it’s about this blog (yes, I’m going meta yet again, maybe this will be my theme for 2024). Specifically, I think I’m going to start moving some of the stuff I post here to another site/service (to be determined).

What will move off of creolened.com:

  • Running and other fitness or health-related stuff (trips to the ER will be excepted, because that sort of thing is perfect for sharing here, as it’s always a comedy of mild horror). The running posts in particular have always been better-suited for a journal, as it’s not interesting to others. I mean, it might be interesting in some tiny way if you also run, but even then, not so much. (I think I started posting my regular runs here in part as a way to keep myself accountable, by making it public, but after 15 years of running, I should probably be OK to take this stuff offline now.)
  • Writing projects.
  • Art or other creative projects.

What would stay on creolened.com:

  • Ramblings and whatever pops into my mind.
  • Reviews.
  • Subjects that interest me, like tech, writing and so on. Opinion pieces, essentially.

What I’m, unsure about:

  • Photography. One-off photos and especially stuff I snap with my phone will still get posted here, but I am undecided where I want my birding or camera photos to live.
  • Anything else I haven’t mentioned already.

I’ll start with the running stuff first, then go from there. I’ll probably keep the running posts here, but maybe make the category non-public, so the posts aren’t visible, then find some clever (?) way to move those posts elsewhere.

Onward to a year when things are different, but hopefully better!

A goose with a pipe (Welcome to my blog, 2024 edition)

Probably my most-used Signal sticker.
What does it say about me? Speculate!

Hello! If you are not a bot or LLM scraping this site to help churn out AI-based internet flotsam, then welcome to my blog! I don’t know how you got here, but if you stick around for a few moments, here are a few things you may find useful to know as of January 2024:

  • I like lists
  • I frequently write about my jogging (three times a week, usually). This is probably not interesting to anyone but me, but I never found another good place to write about it. I at least include a photo or two in these posts for you to enjoy as you scroll past.
  • Other popular topics include:
    • Book reviews (these have fallen off in the last few years).
    • Complaining about Apple (they’re big and carry an outsized impact on us, so I hold them to a higher standard; I am trying to reduce complaining in general, though).
    • Technology (I am not an engineer or anything fancy like that).
    • This blog (I often go meta).
    • Birding (started this back in 2021).
    • Writing prompts (both creating and using them).
    • Photography (mostly birds–see above) and drawing. I don’t get into the technical aspects of photography, I just post my photos.
  • Like a dinosaur, I use WordPress’s Categories.
  • I have plans to redesign the blog, but until I do, some things, like photo galleries, are hard or even impossible to find. This is bad and I feel bad.
  • Generally, I write about whatever I want to write about.
  • Last year, I gave myself permission to write about anything that popped into my head. I have done this multiple times since.
  • I have a Mac and a PC. I generally prefer the PC. I do my drawing on an iPad Pro.
  • My tone can be sarcastic at times. I try never to be mean. I think life, in a way, is absurd, and my writing here may reflect this at times.
  • Starting this year (2024) I am writing a monthly newsletter called Doodlings and Noodlings1We’ll see if this one comes back to haunt me.
  • I am working on my first video game. It should come out this year2We’ll see if this one also comes back to haunt me. Also, I like using footnotes..
  • I am white, male, Canadian, left-handed (but I use a mouse right-handed) and gay.

That’s about it for now. Thanks for reading. I don’t have comments turned on due to spam, but if you want to say something to me, or just send me an inscrutable emoji, I can be reached on Mastodon here: @stanjames@mstdn.social (I’m on other social media platforms, but rarely check or post to them these days. I’m a very low-key social rebel). You can also reach me using old-timey email here: ned@creolened.com

I’m kind of tired of WordPress

photo of man using laptop
Pretend it’s me blogging on WordPress. I would be wearing socks, though. God, I love stock photos. Photo by Canva Studio on Pexels.com

EDIT: Shortly after posting this, I came across a list of blogging platforms in a post on Mastodon. Coincidence or serendipity? Or both? Coincendipity?

This isn’t a complaint about WordPress! WordPress is a rich, diverse tool that can sing, dance and probably rub its belly at the same time. I’ve been using it for this blog since 2005–around 19 years! Obviously, it’s been doing a decent job of letting me get my inane thoughts online, or I would have switched to something else by now1Or become a crazed hermit living in the mountains, eschewing all technology, perhaps.

So why am I tired of it?

It’s big, bulky, and jammed full of features, many of which I don’t use. Its company, Automattic, is increasingly pushing even standalone blogs like this one toward monetization, with plugins like Jetpack having more and more paid features under the premise that if you are using WordPress, you are intending to make money from it, otherwise why aren’t you just posting your cat pictures to Facebook for the price of free2Not counting the price of YOUR ETERNAL SOUL?

What I yearn for is something that is light, clean and simple to use, yet still allows me to do the bloggy things I like:

  • Write down my inane thoughts
  • Write lists, like this one
  • Post photos and drawings
  • Present these things in some kind of organized manner

I feel that WordPress has moved away from the simplicity of humble, handcrafted artisanal blogging. I want to get back there again. I want to touch (virtual) paper.

Where to go next

(I didn’t really need a subheading here, but you see them a lot on important blog think pieces, and I’m always keen to look fancy and smart.)

My choices are roughly as follows:

  • Keep using WordPress and just shut up about it. It works, right?
  • Actually switch to a WordPress alternative.
  • Stop blogging altogether.
  • Post my cat pictures on Facebook for free3I would also need to get a cat.

I’m actually unsure which option to pursue. The last few years I’ve been, in some ways, reconstructing many aspects of my life, and I don’t always know where these things will lead. I suppose this makes it exciting. Whee!

I have no emojis and I must :(

WordPress supports emojis. Behold: 🙂

However, there are two types of emojis:

  1. Emojis that are converted from emoticon text such as :) turning into a happy face
  2. Emojis that are entered using an emoji picker, such as the one in Windows 11:

The former work fine on this blog, but because the database goes all the way back to the ancient internet time of 2005, it uses an old type of character encoding that can’t handle emojis and turns them into question marks instead, like so: ??

This means creolened.com can never show the full and resplendent range of emojis.

🙁

I could convert the database over to accommodate this, but that risks mucking things up on a sitewide scale. And as much as I’d <31WordPress support suggest this should auto-convert to a heart emoji, but alas it does not appear to do so. to have a full array of emojis to draw from, as I am a silly person, I am also at least a little practical.

😳

creolened.com Post #4,823

I’m doing this because I am easily amused.

Reference here: https://birchtree.me/blog/make-good-shit/

4,823 translates to about 253 posts per year, or 21 posts per month. That’s not bad when you consider how seldomly I posted in the early years of this blog (especially 2005-2015 or so). I’m not saying the quality has improved at the same rate, but there’s some decent stuff here, and in the near future, I will try to make it easier to find, so that others can better question my sense of humour, priorities, and fashion sense.

Also, here is a birch tree, as depicted by AI:

Greetings from iA Writer (again)

Hello.

This is another test post written in iA Writer (which just had a big, though non-publishing on other platforms, update), and then magically sent to my WordPress blog, where you are reading it right now, if this worked.

Also, here is a photo of some freaky, somewhat face-shaped fungus at Burnaby Lake:

Fake edit: Publishing from iA Writer is clunky and requires clean-up after. iA Writer’s documentation on this is incomplete. I won’t be doing it again, but without experiments, how would we ever blow things up learn?

I have nothing to say

I think my brain is temporarily broken. I’m in one of those weird phases where the more I try to think of something to blog about, the less I can think of anything to write.

I want to be more positive, and that narrows down possible topics because, let’s face it, complaining about stuff is easy and fun. Fun for a time, at least.

Instead, I’ll just post this haiku about not being able to write anything.

A haiku to an absence of words

I sit down to write
My brain shuts off at the thought
Words huddle inside

Note: I will not be writing 24 posts today

For some time I’ve had an informal rule on this blog to write a post per day or what works out to be a post per day by the end of the month (30 days = 30 posts), then I started going a bit overboard and making it two per day.

At the end of last month, I was 16 posts short of that two per day goal, but I took it upon myself as a challenge and cranked out 16 posts on the last day of the month. It was a little nutty, and kind of fun.

I have been even more derelict in posting this month, meaning I would need to add 24 new posts this month to come up to the magic number of 60.

And I am not doing that.

23 more posts to go!

But I will provide another amusing cat image for having read this far:

Freedom, terrible freedom

A little while back, I gave myself permission to post whatever I liked to this blog, with no filters:

  • Complaints? Sure! Though I try to minimize them.
  • Lists? I love lists.
  • Writing prompts? The sillier, the better. My inspiration.
  • Running updates? These are very skippable if you’re not me, though I started adding photos in the last year so at least there are pretty pictures as you scroll past.
  • Drawings and doodlings? When I have stuff to show, sure.
  • Self-referential posts about the blog like this one? Oh yes.
  • Recipes? No. Or not yet, anyway.
  • Things I like? Sometimes!
  • Reviews? I review every book I read, though my book reading cratered with the pandemic. I also review movies, but watch far fewer now, also a change since the pandemic. And sometimes I do not choose wisely, like when I thought watching Moonfall might be a good use of my time.
  • Other random stuff? I like random stuff.

All of this is a way of saying that I am again having a hard time coming up with stuff to write about, though there should be lots for me to ramble on about. I think I am afraid that anything I write might come out as a complaint because the world is, in many ways, kind of awful (See? I’m kind of doing it right now!) and it feels hard to avoid. I don’t want to just slap on a happy face and pretend everything is groovy, either.

Usually this is where I end with a random cat, but for a change of pace, here is a random sign I photographed a few weeks back1It’s found on the bins in parks for disposing of dog poop. It looks somewhat cooler when seen in isolation :

I am retro

When I look at my current blog design (captured in screenshot form below for posterity, and for when it inevitably changes) it occurs to me that it is quite retro and I hadn’t consciously realized it. Today, I happened to look at someone else’s blog and it was very typical of what you see on most sites–clean white expanses, black text, little in the way of links or other clutter. Just the posts and that’s about it.

Conversely, my site currently:

  • Slaps you in the face with not one, but two bright colours, one that surrounds that traditional black text on white “standard” look.
  • Has a Categories list. Seriously, this is a standard part of WordPress, but I seldom ever come across it elsewhere.
  • An Archives dropdown. Also pretty rare and another built-in part of WordPress. This one is mostly for me, though. Also, easily seeing how many posts I’ve made per month is oddly satisfying.
  • The design isn’t cluttered, exactly, but it isn’t overly spacious, either. I feel most sites have a lot more white space. Mine is…cozier? Maybe it’s just more cramped.

And I’ve actually stripped away a lot of the stuff I used to have. The menus at the top are gone, the logo is now just text.

Maybe one day I’ll finish that redesign. For now, I’ll probably just continue to add bits back, content to have a blog that looks very 2005.

My site, as of November 14, 2023: