Category: General

Semi Styley

Well, I got about halfway thru putting together a new style. The main thing now is to get a new header graphic. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to anything in the various style and config files available that lets me affect the header in any way! Ah well I guess that’ll have to wait for another night; it’s getting late.

Welcome

Hello everyone and welcome to my site. Now that zingman.com is ten years old, I thought it was time to do something a bit more “Web 2.0” while it’s still trendy. So I stared a blog.

By way of introduction, let me just mention that I am a software developer and designer, and also a musician and origami artist. The idea behind this blog is all about the creative process, and resulting works. I want to provide an entry point to pages that change elsewhere on my site, for example when I post something new, such as songs I’ve made or origami models, or interactive software, art work or whatever. Also I want to comment on the creative process of my work as it evolves, and hopefully get some interesting discussions going on. On top of that I will probably be some of the usual bloggish commentary on random things that I see on the street, or in the media, or that are a part of my life and times.

But first things first. As you might have noticed, the look of this page has nothing to do with the design of anything else on my site. So now that the blog engine is up and running, the next order of business is to make it look like it belongs on my site. I hope to do this in fairly short order, but then again…

Attentive readers might observer that I started this blog last November around Thanksgiving, and this really blog 2.0 for me. So here is what happened. I started the first blog using Blogger, and set it up to uploaded the blog into my website. I got as far as Hello World with that, and then had to confront the style question. Blogger provided a bunch of preset styles to choose from, none of which was satisfactory, and all of them overdetermined, like a room covered in ornate wallpaper when all you want is white and blank. My own aesthetic in these things generally runs toward minimalistic, which often has additional virtue of being simpler to implement. So I went ahead and started hand-editing my own style sheet. This is something I can do, but it’s a bit of a drag, so it took a few weeks to get there, and around Christmastime I was ready to debut my new blog. But then Blogger upgraded their software and I got locked out of my account; they seem to have lost my username and password. Oy!

So here I am starting over which WordPress, which has the great advantage of being completely self-contained on my server, without relying on some 3rd party. So that’s cool, and it’s off to a good start. Now back to the style question. Looks like there are some style editing tools available , so we’ll see how that goes…