The Cerebral Mum

No. I’m not ready to move back into the city yet. That task is still weighing me down. I have, however, spent the last couple of days upgrading my blog to Wordpress 2.3 and moving it to a new home on it’s own domain: cerebralmum.com.

Just when I was beginning to get frustrated with the limitations of using a free host and wondering when I would be able to afford to upgrade, I noticed this little paragraph over at Snoskred’s blog, Life in the Country:

I personally made the change to a self-hosted Wordpress blog a little while ago. I’ve mentioned before that we have a dedicated server which isn’t doing much, and I am willing to offer very cheap Wordpress hosting to fellow bloggers wanting to move away from Blogger. Unlike a lot of the other hosts out there, you can pay by the month and we would set it up for you. Just contact me via the contact form if you’re interested. How cheap? How does $5 a month sound? _{Say Goodbye to Google Today…}

How did $5 dollars a month sound? It sounded like Christmas had come early! And then Meg over at Dipping into the Blogpond mentioned it to me as well.

Over the last couple of days I think I’ve decided that all my Christmases have come at once. Snoskred and her partner have been absolutely phenomenal setting up the install and assisting me with the transfer. If anyone has been considering moving to a real host, I most emphatically recommend them. You can contact Snoskred directly using her contact page if you have any questions.

My domain name, incidentally, was purchased from Net Logistics for $25 and they, too, were prompt and professional. Within a couple of hours I was registered. And that was in the middle of the night!

If you aren’t considering moving to paid hosting with your own domain name, here are a couple of things to think about:

• Should I get my own Domain for My Blog?
• Am I A Good Blogger?
• The Pros and Cons of Moving a Blog
• Australian Blogs - Hosting and Search Review

Incidently, for all you Australian bloggers out there, especially the ones terrible at networking llike me, I highly recommend adding Life in the Country and and Dipping into the Blogpond (both linked to above) to your subscriptions if you want to know what is going on in the blogosphere, with a little perspective from our neck of the woods.

Anyway, I’ll be writing more about the move soon but this post is really just to let you subscribers know about the changes because I am about to switch my feeds over to the new site now. If you do not receive my next post, which I will be writing tonight, you may need to visit the new homepage and resubscribe. Hopefully though, the transition will be seamless and you won’t need to do a thing.

All the old posts, and all your wonderful comments, are available there now. So come and visit me at The Cerebral Mum’s new home…

cerebralmum.com

Oh, look… You’re already here!

I have just added a new page, Read, which lists many of the blogs I read daily. I’ve been meaning to do this for quite a while, so that is one thing crossed off my to-do list. I hope you find a few things in there worth reading. I’ve found many bloggers I like through other people’s blogrolls.

_{UPDATE: I need to re-import all my links and re-format them, so this page will be empty until I get that done. My reading list is still available at my old site if you don’t want to wait.}

A while ago I wrote a post about why I started this blog. At the risk of being redundant, I think it deserves some expansion. In the last couple of months I have learned some things about blogging. I have learned why I do it and I have learned what it can do.

Chris Garrett wrote an article for the Blog Herald today, 3 Non-Financial Reasons Why Anyone Should Blog. It unified some of my thoughts and gave me a sort of framework through which I could express them.

The last but not least of Chris’ 3 reasons was the joy of writing. This is obviously an important one for me. I have talked about my need to write over and over again, but I have never mentioned that thing which drives it: My need to be read.

I know there are people out there who “write for themselves”, or I am told that there are, but I cannot relate to them. For me, the need to write is a need to communicate.

This is a polite way for me to say what many writers feel: That what they have to say is worthwhile, that their voice should be heard, that they have something to offer the world. Orwell said there were four motives for people to write: The first was Sheer Egoism, and the following three contained that egoism within them. Writing requires arrogance. No matter how meek, how insecure or how neurotic writers are in their daily lives (and I, myself, can be all of those things), when it comes to their work - published or unpublished, paid or unpaid - there is nothing diffident about them.

In the first sentence of the paragraph above I used the term “writers feel”, but that was coy. Writers know. Even in the depths of despair, even when they go back over what they have written and loathe it, even when they loathe themselves because of it, there is still something in them that is assured.

How much contradictory arrogance did it take to say, as Sartre did in Being and Nothingness, that “Man is a useless passion”? How much authority did Anais Nin assume when she wrote,“The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say”? Writers are secure in the privilege of their voice. I am secure in mine.

My arrogance in this respect may not be the most attractive quality, but there would be no literature in the world if this quality did not move writers to create it.

Blogging feeds writers. Immediately. One push of the button and there are faceless, nameless people all over the world reading what you have written. Your voice is no longer lost in the wilderness, waiting on rejection letters from publishers, hoping for people to hear you. Eventually. When you’re dead. That audience writers know they are entitled to is suddenly, actually, there. They encourage you and they challenge you.

And sometimes, they are moved to speak.

This brings me to Chris’ 1st reason to blog, networking and making friends. Before I started this blog, I had never read a blog. I had written poetry, short fiction, essays, parts of film scripts and half a novel. This was a new medium and I needed to learn. So I dug around and I found voices I wanted to hear, voices I wanted to respond to. I fell in love with blogging, not just because I love the sound of my own voice but because I love the richness of everybody else’s. If all of the arrogance I have written about so far seems a little repugnant, think of this: The humility to be moved by other people’s words is the other side of that coin.

I am a terrible “networker”. I find it difficult to slow myself to the pace which is required to build friendships. I do not have the patience to mine the archaeology of character and I struggle to connect when the cores of us are are covered in the dust of our social boundaries. In the physical world, it is difficult to see inside the vessel and it is difficult to be seen. In the blogosphere, such a synthetic world, there is a visible reality more truthful and more raw than we can perceive in real life.

I once wrote to someone dear to me that if we were able to see all people as they are we would be blinded by the light. So we see our few; we see our “bright, particular stars“ and it is the rarest of joys. Here in cyberspace, the skies are so much clearer.

I have seen so many bright stars in these three months of blogging and the brilliance of their light astounds me. I have seen strength and generosity and sensitivity and integrity. Not everyone I have met through blogging will become my friend in the traditional sense of the word but my contact with them has enriched my life and my mind. And I am so grateful for it.

Just as I am grateful for the opportunities blogging has brought to me, which was Chris’ 2nd reason, and my final one. I have had the opportunity to interact with people I would never have come across in real life, I have had the opportunity to write and to be read. I have received support for my feelings, my thoughts and my work. The enthusiasm I have found here has given me the impetus to return to my novel and I have been asked to join a small writers’ forum where I can work toward finishing it, no longer in a vacuum.

While Chris’ example - a published book on the shelf in Borders - is more concrete than those I’ve listed above, blogging is drawing me, step by step, closer to that goal.

I really need to sign off now. Once again, I have spent the evening at my computer when I should have been packing boxes and doing dishes. And sleeping. And yet… I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of why people should blog and what blogging can do. There is so much more to say.

But not tonight.

I know it’s crazy, but I feel like I haven’t written a real post in ages.

A gallery post doesn’t require much work. At least, not with the plugin I use, WP-Simpleviewer. All I have to do is upload my photos into their own folder and the plugin creates the thumbnails and the flash gallery. The only thing I don’t like about this plugin is that I cannot get the captions to display correctly so for the time being I’ve given up on that. If anyone knows of a plugin which does everything as easily as WP-Simpleviewer AND has working captions, let me know.

And then there are my poetry posts… I’ve stalled at Assignment #3, which was to write about issues. That one is definitely on the back-burner for now while I struggle with it. (It is, after all, 30 poems in 30 days, not A poem a day) While I’m so rusty the writing process is very self-conscious. Once I’ve “found my voice” (and isn’t that a horrid phrase!) I will be able to approach the serious content and stronger emotion with more integrity.

But back to my point.

I really like this poetry project but my bias is toward prose. Or it’s my comfort zone. Or something. So my poems don’t feel like “real” posts either which means I think I need to write two posts a day.

On top of that, I discoved that my contact form was malfunctioning yesterday so no writing got done at all. But it was passed time I started in on that tweaking you need to do when you are using someone else’s theme; adjusting styles, improving navigation, getting posts and pages to appear “just so”.

Last night I started incorporating the Ultimate Tag Warrior into my theme. You can see the results under each post which now shows site search tags and related posts, and on the Archives page which now displays a complete coloured and weighted tag cloud. I am pretty proud of this achievement. It involved me editing my CSS stylesheet and 5 different PHP files.

I don’t know PHP, but with Lorelle’s article, Ultimate Tag Warrior WordPress Plugin for Dummies, the extensive help files the plugin author, Christine Davis, supplied, and some rigorous searching of the WordPress forums to steal a few extra snippets of code… I got it done.

Well, not quite done. I still need to do some work on my sidebar to improve the navigation there. I need to go through all my posts so the excerpts shown on a tag search are not necessarily the default number of characters. I still need to clean up the tags I’ve been using so far. Just a little.

And then there are the other things I need to do.

• Set up a new contact page that functions properly.
• Write an About page.
• Add social bookmarking links to each post. (I’ve tried a few plugins but have found they slowed down page loading significantly.)
• Add RSS feed links and RSS comment feed links to each post.
• Change existing galleries to category posts instead of static pages.
• Create my own “logo” to replace the star in my header.
• Tweak the css until I’m happy with it.
• Add alternate sidebars to display on different types of views.

And the really really big one…

• Change my theme from fluid to fixed width, and from two column to three column.

That will happen when I buy my own domain name and get a host I actually pay for. My present to myself once I sell my house.

I’m pretty sure this to-do list is not exhaustive, in fact my mind has just multiplied it, but last night I made a start.

And tonight, letting all the technology take care of itself, I will get back to writing.

_{UPDATE: New Contact Me page is up and functional. My email address is available there, or you can leave a public message in the comment form.}

_{UPDATE: Contact Me has been updated again and now has a contact form which will deliver email directly to my inbox. I have left the comments open for anyone who would like to leave a public message.}

There is a new logo in my sidebar. Are you wondering what it’s about?On October 15th, one day before Caspar’s first birthday, bloggers all around the world are uniting to put a single issue on everyone’s mind.

This is the inaugural Blog Action Day and the 2007 issue is…

The Environment.

If you’re a blogger and you care, go and register your blog.

All you have to do to participate is publish a post about the issue on October 15th.

Your post can be about anything to do with the environment. So you could write a post which is offtopic for your blog OR relate the environment back to your topic in some way…

…you don’t need to suddenly change your voice, style or emphasis. Simply find an angle on your regular postings which relates to the environment.

Our aim is to get people thinking, discussing, questioning and talking about the environment, from every angle, niche, viewpoint and personality.

_{Get Involved}

If you can’t think of what to write about, there are some great resources to get your mind whirring.

3,986 bloggers, and counting…

I’m one of them.

^{UPDATE: I have removed the 2007 reference links, as they are now out of date. If you would like to read a wrap up of 2007, or sign up for next year, visit their home page: Blog Action Day}

So this is it. I don’t care anymore.

I think that I have spent over five hours today (interupted by changing nappies, making bananas on toast, playing on swings at the park, buying groceries, singing Klap eens in je handjes and going “sploring”) wading through the quagmire that is WP Theming in hopes of solving all my “lipstick” problems. Those five hours would have been more productively spent if I had been lost on the Yorkshire moors searching for Heathcliff.

So this is it. This is what my site will look like. It’s functional, and readable and I don’t care. I didn’t start this blog in order to spend my time “designing”. I started it so that i could WRITE, which is the one thing I haven’t been doing at all. It’s past time that I actually let everyone know that I was here and that they had a way to keep up with what’s going on in my life, and in my head, given that I’m so isolated at the moment.

And who admires the gilding on the cage when the bird doesn’t sing?

This blog may not turn out to be Solid Gold but I’ll be singing.

Klap eens in je handjes, ^{Clap in your little hands,}
Blij, blij, blij. ^{Happy, happy, happy.}
Op je boze bolletje, ^{On your angry head,}
Allebei. ^{Both of them.}

Handjes in de hoogte, ^{Little hands in the air,}
Handjes in je zij. ^{Little hands on your hips.}

Zo varen de scheepjes voorbij… ^{That’s the way the little ships sail away…}

^{Translation by Anchar}

After going through about a gazillion wordpress themes at Theme Viewer and any other place I could find, I’m still trying to figure out what exactly I want this damn site to look like. My original choice was to use J Quindlen’s QGrunge because I really liked the arched layout and the way the header stretched across the full screen while the page content was limited to a width readable on most people’s computers, but using someone else’s theme isn’t very personal (or creative) and after a few misguided attempts to customise it I realised it wasn’t the best place for a beginner to begin.

So I went back to the default Kubrick theme, using an Egon Schiele drawing as a starting point for the new design. After a bit of CSS fiddling and a lot of work in Macromedia Fireworks I got it to look as it does now, still with the arches I liked and a gradient fill across the top to unify the header with various screen sizes. I still haven’t rigged it to work with a single post display, though.

And after all that…

I’m still not happy.

She looks pretty, doesn’t she?

But now I’m thinking that I should strip back the layout and lose the arches so that one header works with everything. And the content border seems to dominate the actual content. Most blogs I’ve looked at have very zen design and I’m wondering if what I’ve done so far is just overkill. A blog, after all, exists to be read, not just to be looked at. Kind of like me. Should my site be wearing so much eye-liner at her age?

And then there is of course the really big issue, raised at Lorelle on Wordpress (the place to go if you’re starting a blog!) in the article Should You Design Your Own Blog? : What does my design actually tell a visitor about the content? Even if people think it is nice to look at, how can they know that it is something they want to read? In the end, isn’t this just as generic and impersonal as using somebody else’s theme?

Maybe that didn’t matter so much when I first decided to do this, but I have found a couple of other uses for this space apart from just keeping friends and family up to date so I need to get it all together. It would be good to get some outside opinions about this but as I haven’t even told the friends and family yet, let alone getting it listing properly on the search engines, I shall continue to flounder about here (where, using Lorelle’s brilliant guidelines, I think I have already done every single thing wrong) until I feel that it is really ready to go.

But… learning by doing. It always works in the end. That’s why little girls steal their mother’s make-up isn’t it?