Two weeks into this blog project, I’m still not certain how I will fare attempting to do this long-term. Working full-time takes a lot of energy, and I don’t always feel up to making a post here. Nevertheless, I do it anyway. I’m not willing to slap up any old post. Most of them require at least a little research. All of them require a fair amount of thought, and as I write these later in the evening, my brain is not terribly happy with being forced to do more work. On the other hand, I have been breaking through those limits day after day–I just need to keep myself disciplined and motivated.
But that kind of thing is boring to read about. Let’s talk about some of the technical aspects.
If you’ve been here prior to yesterday, you’ll have noticed there’s a new theme in place. It’s RenNews Child, which is modification of MH Newsdesk Lite. There are paid versions of MH News, and I may actually go for one of them in the future. I’ve also gone back and added header images to each post, to flavor things up a little. There is evidence out there that people prefer sites with color and images, so I might as well. Besides, it’s nice to look at and gives the place a little character. The images themselves come from Unsplash, StockSnap, the ImageInject plugin (which scans Flickr), and sometimes I pull appropriately licensed images from Wikipedia. I’ve put a Creative Commons license on this site and any images I use are either public domain or licensed in a way that is compatible with my chosen CC license. I take that sort of thing seriously, and it disappoints me that many other blogs and even major news sites happily rip images from anywhere they can find them, and often don’t even properly attribute the source, much less ask permission to use the image. To me, that is incredibly lazy, not to mention illegal (not that anyone is bothering to enforce it.)
With that little rant out of the way, one thing I’m still missing is a logo. I am still working on that. Hopefully I will have one before the next of these meta posts comes along.
As always, the current look of the site can’t be considered final. Nothing online ever is, really. Even so, I doubt I will use anything radically different from this. I like this style and it makes the site easy to navigate. Most changes will boil down to a bit of reorganization and visual flair. I don’t like to spend a lot of time on those because the meat of this site is my writing–you can get pretty pictures anywhere.
Here’s to another week!
