Tinkering itch

Today's photo was taken yesterday, and is just to prove that my father does indeed have tulips in his yard. The deers will, no doubt, eat them before they flower, but this is how they look now.

The rest of the week's pointless photos will probably feature a cat on a leash and various piles of deer poop. Consider yourself warned.

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I'm feeling the urge to tinker with the blog again. Or blogs, rather. It happens every once in a while. Actually, come to think of it, the blogs have looked this way for rather a long time in my tinkerage scale. Maybe it's time I played around with things a bit.

I've mentioned this before, but I really only started blogging in order to tinker. You see, I wanted to practice playing around with some basic html but I really didn't want to bother starting a website. This was back before auto layouts and wysiwyg editors in blog land, by the way. If you wanted something beyond bare bones, you had to do it yourself.

That was kind of fun, if frustrating. I didn't know what I was doing, so I sat there with one of those moron-style self help books ('scuse the term moron. I know it's not exactly PC, but I really don't want to advertise either of the book series that use stupidity-based terms) trying to figure out code. It was rewarding in a weird sort of way as well. It might have taken me an afternoon to successfully make a few tiny changes in the way things looked, but by the time I managed it I understood what was going on. Besides, I did it all by myself, mommy.

Now? Well, when Blogger switched to a more user-friendly template format I changed my hand-coded template to one of those. It was just easier. I still use the html editor when I post, but I think that's simply out of the need to know at least a little bit about what's going on behind the scenes. Control issues much? Maybe.

The ironic thing, of course, is that now that it's so easy to make changes to a blog template I've stopped tinkering. It'd take me five minutes to do what would have been a day's worth of try and try again, but I don't bother. As a result, my bogs don't have much personality anymore compared to some of the stuff you see out there. I mean, I like the minimalist style of this template (which is appropriately called Minima...), but would it hurt to throw a picture up behind the header or something like that? Change the colours just for a lark? Change the font now that everybody and his dog seems to be using Papyrus?

Maybe next weekend I'll have to plan a little tinkering time.

Not right now, though. I have other ways of wasting time today.





Hey, at least I'm honest about it.







The silly thing about all of this is that I initially started blogging only so that I could learn something about website design. Now? I seem to be blogging only to hear the sound of my own voice -- or typing, I guess -- and the work website that I recently started helping maintain doesn't require any knowledge of web design. You need basic knowledge of desktop publishing to use the editor, yes, but there's not a single style=" in sight. Figures, doesn't it?