Monday, February 04, 2002

I've now put a blog on OC Book's home page though I've been doing it the 'hard' way with html and sending it via ftp. I don't want to use Blogger for it because it would mean the whole page would be mucked around - I presume. Not sure if I can do a test run on it, so in the meantime I'll use the old-fashioned method - which doesn't bother me anyway. I see even Time Magazine has got on the bandwagon with an article on blogging - which means, if I want to do some articles in NZ about them I'd better get a move on. Having had a crook finger for the last few days has rather set me back from doing much writing - infected it somehow internally. Now how can you do that? I mean, why would your finger just up and get itself infected from the inside? Struth! Looking up internal infection on Google doesn't give me much clue - I can find something on swimmer's ear (I always thought most swimmers had two ears) or internal infection in aquarium fish or a nasty piece on how bird faeces can get airborne, get into the lungs and infect you internally, leading to disability and sometimes death. Ouch.
Onto something less drastic.
Seeing somewhere that it was easy (oh, yes, in the Time magazine article) to change the way the page was laid out, I've changed the format of the page - really brave - and hopefully it will have gotten rid of that ugly green and yellow, which in spite of being somewhat similar to the Norwich football team's colours, isn't that attractive.

Monday, January 28, 2002

Having said I was giving up the Blog, I'm tempted back into it by reading all these other bloggers, especially the ones I interviewed by email for this article I'm aiming to do....or these articles in the plural that I'm attempting to get off the ground. The variety of blog-approaches is interesting. I suppose I hadn't really got to look at too many others in the past because the huge lists of blogs on places like Blogger are overwhelming to the degree that you give up quickly. None of them mean anything to you - in a personal sense - and so they appear to be just some body ranting off about their life or other people's lives, neither of which they seem to like very much - and often the language is that of a person who learned the basics in primary school, added 97 swear words in secondary school and now strives to get those 97 words into most sentences, to the exclusion of any other words that might be available. One of the writers on the writers' list today claimed that English has its roots in German and that the Norman conquest proves this. Hmmm, I'd always thought William the Conqueror was French, or at least came from that part of the world. Curious how history appears to be changing! Maybe it's a by-product of deconstructionism. Or maybe, more likely, it's a by-product of ignorance. Another writer on this same list the other day claimed that Great Britain consisted of England, Scotland, Wals and Cornwall. Hmm. Don't know when Cornwall became a country rather than a county. Of course, it's a little difficult sometimes to see a single letter like 'r' on a computer.

I think what irritates me about blogging via Blogger, is that I'm having to learn aspects of web-design all over again - web-design according to the Blogger rules, which ain't that self-explanatory. I don't like the way it's all set-up - certainly there's an ease of getting the stuff you write onto your page...once you've figured out how the heck you do it...but trying to make the page look half-way appealing is a major task, and not something I'm really keen to spend the hours required doing. In the meantime, then, if I want to keep writing in this Blog, I have to put up with the end result which is an ugly page (even though Ben had a go at sorting it) and the inability to make it look as though I care two hoots about it.