Category Archives: About a blog

Last week, I signed myself up for the Alt Design Summit, a conference for design and lifestyle bloggers.

I have a lot of feelings about this.  Generally feelings that involve swear words.  And while I’m ok having a little f-bomb here and there, the quality and quantity of verbiage burbling in my head is more than I feel comfortable posting.

So use your imagination.

What the shiznip was I thinking?  I’m not a snarfing lifestyle blogger. And I’m sure as shiitake not a design blogger.  The registration is not refundable!  All of the strangers!  And the mingling!  Meeting people and trying to tell them that I have a blog!  Bocce balls!

etc etc etc

It was a glittering hailstorm of self doubt that escalated in a week of not blogging at all.  What’s the best way to fulfill one’s self fulfilling prophecy of having a shitty blog?  Don’t blog at all!

So, it’s Monday again now and I am still terrified of what I’ve done.  But I’m going to cache in on a current über cliche and just try to keep calm and carry on.

It’s not until January 18th.  That’s ages away.  No point getting all hepped up about it now.

And fear of what other people will think of me is unacceptable reason to stop doing something I want to do.  It’s ok to be afraid.  It’s not ok to let that feeling bully me.

My anxiety about this is forcing me to realize something:  writing this little blog is important to me.  I feel very insecure about it and am therefore loathe to admit it, but I really want to make it work.  I don’t know what making it work means yet, but I know I haven’t done it.  The desire to achieve that making-it-workness was actually the driving force behind signing up for Alt Summit.  I’m hopeful that it will be inspiring and educational.

That hope got seriously overwhelmed by bad attitude.  And just like after a miserable failure with my diet, after a week off from blogging, I feel the allure of just giving up.

The bossy annoying half of my head is all “You can’t give up!  You JUST admitted that this is important to you!”
So the creative writer side says “Oh, yeah, bossypants?  What’s tomorrow’s awesome post going to be about then, you snatch hatcher?  Maybe you should write it!”
Fisticuffs ensue.

I can’t even tell you about how that fight turns out because it is still tumbling around, in and out, through plate glass windows.  Just like Mark Darcy and Daniel Cleaver.  Except with fewer British accents.

I’ve had this plaguing sentiment that my blog didn’t look very nice, but wasn’t really sure how to fix it.  I knew that the prefab Ocadia theme on WordPress was part of the problem.

I really didn’t like the look of the page on top of a background.  Or the round edged colored boxes.

I knew I wanted something cleaner and better, but the gargantuan number of theme options available on WordPress, while commendable, is kind of challenging.

But then I saw a blog on the Freshly Pressed page that I liked, discovered that you can find out what theme they’re using, and then I swiped it.  Immediately, things were looking much better.

Although, this new theme comes automatically with a header with an image of some book spines.

Books are definitely nice.  I read books.  Sometimes I write about books.  But it’s not really the right header for me.

My books aren’t leather bound.  They are much more likely to have gamboling bunnies or wizards on the spines.

Thankfully, there were options to replace that image with one of your own.  I thought that I’d really like to have a collage sort of image there, so first I tried to find myself a collage making tool.

But I didn’t like that at all.

So I pulled up my boot straps and I opened PhotoShop.  After several attempts and a lot of googling for instructions on how-to, I finally got something that I liked.

And now I think that the whole thing is just much prettier.  I like looking at me at lot more now.