My Lonely City

Well. As you may be aware, my next big thing is changing the theme of my blog. (And my other blogs, too – Lit in Progress which you should only visit if you’re feeling masochistic, and On Wanting More, which is my … devotional journal.)

My blogs now look different. Yes. But they are not yet the visions of loveliness I had hoped they would be. They all now use the web publishing system Mephisto – but I cannot take credit for this. My husband migrated them for me. (I’m picturing my fledgling blogs, flying with outstretched necks in a wavering V-shape, calling down derisive comments in a language no one understands…) And I’m kind of sitting here thinking … now what?

I don’t do programming. I took a Pascal class at a community college while I was in high school (concurrent enrollment, savior and bane of my scholarly sanity) and made – gasp! – a B, because I didn’t begin any of my programs until the day they were due, and I forgot about one of the tests, and … so I decided that it wasn’t for me. Because I slacked off similarly in every other class and got at least an A-. (This is me rolling my eyes. Can you see me?) I actually quite enjoyed the class, but … failed to pursue that line of study, as it were.

And that was several years ago, all I did was little dribbles of codespeak that looked things up and did simple calculations, and it was Pascal for crying out loud. So I’m not in the best of places from which to begin creating a design template.

What I’ve done: Besides piddling around on the internet wasting time? I’ve got my designs into html, using Dreamweaver. (Yes, cheating. Guilty. Lea’me-alone.) I’ve downloaded a few different themes that I like – almost, but not quite, as much as my own – and even taken a cursory look at their innards.

Which are clean and list-like, full of important-sounding chimera words like filedto and commentsblock textarea, and completely incomprehensible. Spaces, people. They have a purpose. So my first thought was, oh, I’ll just have a stare-and-compare between my little page and the template’s main css dealymabob, and Bob’s your uncle. (Side note: my husband actually has an uncle named Bob. This kind of freaks me out.)

Hah ha ha. Yeah. Right. Perhaps I’m thinking that by staring at them long enough they letters will start to rearrange themselves into some kind of recognizable syntax. Or perhaps I’m waiting for myself to lose interest. Neither has occurred.

What I need to do: Go through that article about creating a template again, and, erm, follow the directions.

Bah. I thought the point of this exercise was not to be bored?