Maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration. 150-odd thousand words before the move to WordPress, at Blog 369. Add another 31 entries, and that probably makes little difference… Another 10k? I know I can be quite windy at times, but am I really that windy?
“Ye-e-e-es.”
— Helios, Deus Ex
So, 400 Excerpts from the Life of RDZ.
The blog has been running for four years now. Its fourth birthday was some time back in May, and I conveniently forgot all about it. The first Excerpt was posted on Thursday, May 18, 2006. That was a long time ago; even before I started university. Oh, sixth year of school, how I should have gone to college for you… Not that that had anything to do with me starting a blog; more to do with me maturing into a very long-winded and shameless self-publicist.
(Come to think of it, roughly one hundred entries per year is a strange average, what with my purporting to do this only once per week…)
Of course, that isn’t even the true beginning (which was on Torch’s Domain, and at least a few months before then), so maybe I should can the MySpace date and celebrate the new beginning on WordPress instead? But if I did that, I’d look like a scammer that started his post-count really high to make himself look prolific… Oh the dilemma. I should stick to celebrating milestone entries instead, they’re easier to keep track of. What with the count in the title and all.
“It’s the maintenance man. He knows I’m terrible at maths.”
— Gunther Hermann, Deus Ex???
The blog (thankfully?) is not as old as my Warcraft modding career, which spans an indefinite length of time that may or may not surpass six years. It might even be seven now. It’s called “perseverance”.
So now that I’ve been sitting on WordPress for a whopping 31 entries, I am in a good position to compare its performance as a blogging platform to that of MySpace.
Of course, I think you can tell just by looking at the front page (let alone all the behind-the-scenes magic) that it is considerably superior. It doesn’t flood half the page with flash ads, for a start. And it’s got configurable side pages like the This Wreckage suite. How convenient — I can lure people here with the promise of hints, horribly disappoint them, and get them hooked on my blog!
The editing tools are definitely a lot less flaky then MySpace; there were far too many entries that were created and then died because of spurious editor problems. WordPress saves me from myself by auto-saving, and I spend a lot of time saving drafts so I can put a lot more work into each entry before actually publishing it.
Of course it’s not all been plain sailing; what with that time I crashed the entire WordPress server (or something like it) when I accidentally hit “publish” and then cancelled and then deleted the half-published entry… I made them fix ‘a bug’ on the servers from that, at any rate. And then there’s the publish-in-the-future tool; last time I tried that, I decided to publish early and it wouldn’t let me cancel the publishing in the future and it became a bit of a clusterfuck (ended up deleting the entry entirely and copy-pasta’ing it to a new entry). Maybe it’s just me.
I feel a little bit ambigious about the visual theme I’ve got here. It looks nice and all, but it suffers from an awfully narrow content column. Now, this wouldn’t be an issue if I had access to the CSS (I looked at it — a matter of, naturally, changing one number), but in order to edit the CSS I have to do a microtransaction. By all means, I luff blogging, but I’m not prepared to shell out for it (yet). Especially when the issue could be solved by a (free) theme switch… but I like this theme, and most of the variable-width ones are three-column or ugly or otherwise undesirable.
It’s more confusing because the edit-box I do all the actual writing in is the perfect width, while the actual presentation is a bit squished. It makes entries look longer than they really are, too, probably putting off the whole casual “tl;dr” crowd (who won’t have made it to this far down)…
Well, we’ll see how it goes. Maybe I’ll have moved to some other website in another four years’ time. Maybe I won’t even be blogging by then (however unlikely that eventuality may seem). Maybe I’ll have a nice job, be successful, have got a girlfriend, and I just won’t care anymore…
Aye, right.
Rao Dao Zao 