Blog

I’ve spent a lot of time in the guts of this theme’s design, learning the CSS, tinkering and breaking things. I’m now starting in on the changes I need to how it displays the front page. I’m pretty excited about the idea of using this place to be the center of my digital spiderweb again.

The pandemic killed my blog, but after five years of stagnation, I am making the moves to restore it. One, a more dedicated theme that’s less picture-heavy and more text-forward. The few blogs I’ve kept up on are shorter, more link and text-focused blogs like Waxy.org, or Kottke.org.

What my blog used to be.

I spent a lot of spare time in the last year trying to get a Ghost.org site going with an integrated newsletter, but despite an amazing install, I found I was unable to tweak it to my own needs on my own. Not to mention a lot of modern web design tries to force featured pictures, SEO perfection, and other mechanical things on the blogger. I hate it all, one reason social media has worked for me has been small, light, text-forward behaviour.

I’ve come back to WordPress, found a theme that is close to what I wanted that is light, speedy, and text-forward, and I’m slowly rebuilding the site again but all myself with an eye toward letting it work the way it work, rather than trying to look slick, marketable, or graphics-heavy. It’s going to be a blog-central site again.

I may change my mind, but there’s been so much I want to write up that I’ve learned over the last ten years. Maybe some of it will be interesting to you.

I’m not sure.

But it’s nice to ramble again.

Hopefully, in the weeks ahead, I will be able to start integrating the Patreon stories and member-only content over here. Once I get the main site running again like it used to be.

It’s not done, but I’m already feeling like I’m home again. Toby’s corner online. My front porch.

It doesn’t come with iced tea and rocking chairs. But hopefully the vibes are similar.