A long time ago, I started creating my own site in php. I used to have some facility in php and enough of a grasp of css that I thought I could develop a whole site. It would have a blog with site-specific news (that’s what this wordpress was for), and it would show my most recent posts on livejournal, and it would have pages about me-as-a-writer, maybe some of my stories would go up. The other key thing was that it would have some of my non-writerly things on it, which would have their own color scheme and a different title.
I did amazingly well at creating a logo/title I liked and at setting it up to have a welcome/why-you-should-be-here bit at the top, and even succeeded at getting two columns to have site news and lj-blog news.
But the layout… not so much.
And then I wondered… why am I spending so much time on this, when wordpress is designed for this stuff? Other people do *amazing* things with wordpress. Am I too good for that? Too lazy to figure it out?
Finally, I’ve thrown in the towel. I’m accepting wordpress as my personal website-savior. I’ll probably write some posts on LJ, some here which cross-post to LJ, and some here that don’t. (LJ people don’t care when I update this site. Then again, you might not either.) So, I’ve added all sorts of nifty plugins which should make this look the way I want. (Notice the nifty Haiku Corner plugin, which randomly displays an unformatted Haiku! I could not, for the life of me, get it to preserve line-breaks. I don’t know why either.) It should accomplish all of the things I intended with my liza-developed site… only be easier to maintain, with all sorts of nifty features that I don’t have to develop.
Any day now, the index.php at www.intelligentlizard.com will go away, and for some time you will be redirected here, to www.lizaolmsted.com. (Until I manage to move the contents of wp. to www., without losing anything important. Wish me luck!)
I am excited by this change. I’ve wanted to have a nice site for myself for a long time, so I could direct people to it without being ashamed. Soon, it will be possible.
