by oscar ospina via furiamag
I never commemorated my 100th post that occurred two posts ago. It went by with a whimper, unrecognized by anyone. This will not stand. Please enjoy this awesome illustration of monsters around the number 100 – representing my post. Thank you.
Blogging is a funny thing. People get into it for all different reasons. I think right up top is a lot of people think they can become millionaires from having the right blog. They see success stories that other people have had or created, like boingboing or gizmodo and they think, “Why not me too?” – and there is some truth to that. Your blog can go viral because of something you write or create and then before you know it you have your own reality show. There’s definitely a disease a lot of people my age have contracted from growing up in front of the TV and during the Internet explosion, not sure what the name of that disease is, but it makes you want people to listen to you and to be popular. I think to an extent, that’s what a lot of people are looking for – and they’ll never get it.
Not to be corny, and I’m sorry that this is corny and I know it, but I think you can make yourself feel a little bit better about the whole enterprise if you write on your blog just for yourself, and to express things you have inside you, that maybe will take a life of their own out in the “world”. Like letting a little monster out of a cage that goes on to help someone build a new picket fence without you even knowing it. If that makes any sense.
Even though I am trying to take that angle in my blog writing, I am feeling an overwhelming frustration. I admit it. When my stats counter says 10 people have read my blog today, and 3 of them are me in another browser I haven’t logged into, and 7 are a weird URL that I visit and goes to a website that I know is doing something shady with marketing – I get sad. Seeing all the other bloggers out there striving to be read – like ants crawling all over each other to get to a tree branch – I get sad. Although in reality, I think those ants are trying to help one get up to that branch for the greater good, which is kind of nice, in its way.
So here I am writing a post and hoping someone might read this and others below it, and feeling like all of us bloggers typing randomly might eventually write all the works of Shakespeare, like those hypothetical monkeys in this blog title.
This site was great. Explained how to make font size bigger. It’s this line in the HTML edit part of the posting screen (switch from the Visual Tab to the HTML tab on the top right there):
<font size = “3” color = “black”> Text here </font>
So I can add new fonts if I use one of the 10 or so themes that they have integrated with one WordPress. My theme, “Simpla”, which I am loving, is not one of those themes, of course. I looked at the ones that I COULD use, because I love FONTS and the one I use is important because I need to like the way it looks on the screen – but alas – I do not like those themes like I like my “Simpla” (funny how you have to have something you didn’t know about 30 minutes ago).
From continued reading on the Typekit website, I think I can do this in a sort of manual way. They make sly reference to the idea I have to know HTML and CSS (don’t) – but it looks like just a lot of cutting and pasting to me, so let’s get it on!!! (This is going to get ugly, I know it).
So first things first (hate this saying) – need to figure out how to change the FONT to something nicer to read in WordPress. Might as well make a to do list:
1. Fix this FONT.
2. Post some interesting things.
3. Get a cool graphic for the top right of the page.
4. Possible learn to do this myself in TYPEFACE or in Drupal (the whole blog creation – CSS thing. I guess these might be separate).
5. I think it’s important to just start writing though, like Merlin Mann says. I am finding he is right, where I have wanted to just research everything and do all this myself and start looking for images to make the front page look cool before I even, you know, actually write anything. Because really, the writing is the hard part.
6. I really really hate and don’t understand why people post a comment with FIRST!. I get it, but I mean, that’s like the lowest form of celebrity or acknowledgment ever conceived. I mean, if being standing up behind the guy on the Fan-a-Vision at baseball game and waving is a 2 – then the FIRST! guy is like what negative number…
It’ll get better. We hope.
StaringDownMedusa 