SmartRemarks

Well, I did it! If anyone happened to encounter difficulty reading the blog between about 11:30 PM and 2:30 AM (CST) last night, it’s because I was busy upgrading the back end to the newly released WordPress 2.7. (Ideally I’d have liked to have some sort of “Under Maintenance” screen in place for visitors; I do in fact have the Maintenance Mode plugin, but as the upgrade process involves deactivating all plugins anyway, it wouldn’t really have done much good.)

This was the first time I had to walk through the WordPress installation process “by hand,” and hopefully the last.  Read the rest of this entry »

So as anyone who pays attention to the technical side of the blogging world (although I have no idea what small, obsessive sliver of the population that may be) is probably aware, WordPress 2.7 is scheduled for release in a few days—December 10th, to be specific. In fact, it’s already been rolled out as of today (Thursday) for bloggers hosting at WordPress.com, and for the externally hosted (like me) there’s the only-slightly-preliminary “WordPress 2.7 Release Candidate 1.”

I’m not usually an early adopter of new software; if I have something I like that works, I stick with it… but this is a major upgrade, and they’ve been teasing its improvements for a while now. (At least as long as I’ve been blogging, in fact, which after all only dates back to September.) I don’t feel like waiting.

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A change of pace from all the doom-and-gloom…

As a newcomer to blogging, I’ve been learning a lot on the fly. I chose WordPress as my platform because it’s open-source software, with a reputation for having a large and enthusiastic user community and (thus) being very easy to modify via free third-party plugins.

It’s certainly lived up to that reputation, and I’ve found myself using quite a lot of those plugins to customize and streamline my blogging experience. In particular, I use the following (including the one that automatically generated this handy hotlinked list!), and cheerfully recommend them to others:
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More than two years ago now, a good friend of mine observed that I seemed to have a lot to say about a lot of topics (or as some other acquaintances might put it, I’m hard to shut up), and that perhaps I ought to start a blog to express myself. I thought this was a terrific idea, and decided I’d get to it right away. I spent a fair chunk of time reading up on the software options (settled on WordPress as clearly the best), blogging technique, and so forth. (And I tried to get the actual domain “SmartRemarks.com” — but despite the fact that the owner has it up on an auction site and isn’t using it for anything, his asking price was a couple orders of magnitude higher than the reasonable offer I made him. Go figure.)

That was, as noted, more than two years ago. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then, not only in the areas I’m inclined to write about but in my own life (I’ve started and ended an entire job, for instance). Blogs weren’t exactly novel even in 2006, but at this stage of the game, out of the 6.7 billion people on earth, I suspect I’m about number 6.8 billion to start a blog.

So be it. I’m here now, and this is where I’ll say what I have to say.

It’ll be eclectic… I’ve always specialized in being a generalist. People who blog about blogging (there are more than you’d think!) insist that if you’re “serious” about it, if you want to “monetize” your blog, you need to find a single narrow niche or gimmick and market the hell out of it. I’m not going to do that, because I suspect it would drain all the fun out of it as well. My posts will probably fall into quite a few disparate categories. Let the chips fall where they may.

Prominent among those categories, I’m sure, will be two particular enthusiasms: American politics, and comic books. I think we’ll all be better off if I don’t try too hard to connect those two. If I actually pick up any kind of a following here, then, it’ll probably involve groups of people who are interested in one particular category of posts and don’t give two hoots about most of the rest. (But hey, you never know. Maybe I can inspire some crossover.)

I’ll just have to rely on finding interesting things to say.