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!

There is a lot going on right now. Good things. Life things. Rather than being stuck in my fog, I am now flooded by things to do. I’m inspired again, motivated again, and that’s exciting. I won’t be taking a break - I’ve found that I can’t stay away from this blog - but I will be trying not to post every day. I’m currently considering 4 posts a week, Monday to Thursday, or every second day. I haven’t decided yet but regardless of what I decide, it can only improve what I write here.

I don’t want to burn out. I have a terrible habit of burning out and, although I used to get so much done before my candlewicks met in the ashen middle, with Caspar now I just don’t have the luxury of recovery time and I have to find new ways to be productive. That sounds so tedious, “productive”, yet that part is exciting as well. The idea of focussing my energies on the things that matter to me (including this blog), of giving them the quality and consistency of attention they deserve instead of flailing around helplessly torn between the things I have to do and the things I need to do, just seems… hopeful.

I’ve always felt as though I had a purpose but all to often that feeling has been theoretical, overwhelmed by the demands of daily things if not completely incompatible with them. At times it has been present as a burden; something I used to beat myself down with, a weapon made of imagined failure which cut me and starved me both literally and figuratively and multiplied into an army. At the worst times, it has been hidden from me entirely.

Purpose.

I don’t think purpose is something ordained at birth: I don’t think it is something given to us with the colour of our eyes. I think it evolves in us through experience: I think it is our discovery of what is important to us, the unfolding pattern of the things we care about. Whatever those things may be - and they could be anything from cross-stitch to a cure for cancer - when we are struggling to give them space in our lives, we don’t feel important. We lose our sense of connection to the world. Everything becomes grey.

Right now, in my hemisphere, life is not grey. The sun is coming out from behind the clouds and it is Spring. Life is happening again. I was asked to join an online writer’s group and am now able to post draughts from my novel, get feedback and interact again with other writers facing the same issues, so I am no longer going to put off until tomorrow what I can do today. I’ve been asked to help create a new charity, which will entail a lot of work but which will be very worthwhile. I have a stellar idea for another blog, one which will create a resource rather than a record of my personal thoughts, and I want to start on the planning for it. And I also need to put some energy into my desire to go back to university next year, fill out more forms, make phone calls, make sure I’m not just another file on the course co-ordinator’s desk.

I have a lot of purpose. And none of it is theoretical.

Just wanted to let you all know that I’m sick at the moment. I’ll be back writing when I’m better.

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.}

Just a quick note to anybody who has used my contact form. The plugin I am using is not functioning as it should so I have taken the page down for now and am working on getting it fixed.

I cannot apologise enough for this. I most definitely would have responded to your emails.

If you would like to resend your comments or enquiries I can be contacted at…

cerebralmum(at)optusnet(dot)com(dot)au

So so stoopid me.

When I first set up this site my intention was to create a vehicle to keep my friends and family in the loop with all things Caspar. His Oma and Grandad and most of the extended family are overseas or interstate and I’m terrible at staying in touch. And perhaps his father would read it and feel a little closer to the human being we created. He can’t be here, and that seems much harder to me than being a single mother. In the last couple of days, however, I’ve realised why I actually chose to communicate this way. After all, I could have just bulk-emailed a monthly newsletter.

It’s because I’m a writer. I have been ever since I learned to write. And I’m not good at small talk so those “newsy”, intimate posts I first added to this blog read like contextless babble from some entity other than myself. I don’t like her. Good writing always has context. Context exists within it the same way our consciousness is grounded in our bodies.

And I’m a good writer.

I know this because when I write my thoughts expand exponentially and the world becomes both clearer and more mysterious to me. I know this because when I write I recognise my skin. I become aware.

I know this whether I have an audience or not. And by audience, I mean those people who can or could hear me, not anyone and everyone who adds to my click count. I will always a have an audience of one: I can hear my self. And I know where I am: I am home.

So it’s time to remove those first Noodle Posts (What is a Noodle Post?) and let this blog be what it knew it was even when I didn’t.

There’s still a lot to do. I need to fix up my tags and categories and make this space organically functional for whoever chooses to read it. There are a couple of pages I want to add, a couple of design changes I’d like to make. I still have a lot to learn about feeds and and trackbacks and bookmarking. But all that pales in comparison to my need to write.

So the first, and probably the most important, lesson I have learned about blogging is to just get it working, then write. If that’s not why you started, maybe you’ll find it’s the reason you keep going. Not just in blogging, but in life.

I’ll still be posting Noodles for my special people, but I will pay them the respect of writing them. My noodles will be served with saffron.

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}