I spent New Year’s Eve at a funeral — the mother of a
friend. Seemed appropriate, perhaps moreso than the usual hoo-ha with bubbly
and celery sticks. I sat near the back, taking note of the rows of white hair
before me. It felt distinctly like a queue — an illusory and self-entitled POV,
I realize. “This is all an elaborate hoax,” wrote Roger Ebert. The final words of the dying are almost inevitably
ciphers, but given the right conditions I can appreciate a good hoax, even when
the last laugh is on me.
I’m whistling past the graveyard, of course. “Glib” is as unattractive as either “smarm” or “snark,” and I’m not particularly gifted at it. “Attention must be
paid,” and that’s what I hope to do — to keep doing — with greater resolve in the new
year.
I’ve not yet decided what changes I’ll apply to the blog in
this my 11th year of blogging, but a template shift is overdue. Not
the “dynamic” mode that dazzled me a year ago, but one that at least acknowledges
our growing struggle with on-screen text by gently shepherding the beleaguered reader’s
focus toward a more civilized and manageable column.
But in the meantime, Excelsior! to you who read and write and watch and listen: I salute you.
2 comments:
>>>one that at least acknowledges our growing struggle with on-screen text by gently shepherding the beleaguered reader’s focus toward a more civilized and manageable column
Well, I'm curious to see what that ends up being. I actually have no problem with the blog the way things are now (reads fine for me), but I'm always curious to see what improvements can be made, and possibly steal them from you.
Have you been following this whole thing about dynamic mode not working for months now?
http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2013/08/dynamic-template-instabilities-have.html
http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2013/08/dynamic-template-instabilities-have-multiple-causes.html
I'm not a techie, but it appears that a lot of these larger blogs are not working in different formats. (I still have a link to dynamic view on my sidebar, but it hasn't worked for months).
I followed your lead and put the "dynamic" link on my sidebar, but took it down when it stopped working. Dynamic still seems to work for Prajer Grafik, but of course that's a much smaller blog, with a very simple concept and execution. I'm not much of a techie either, but when I talk to friends who are, they say blogs Wordpress are much buggier than Blogger. Maybe Google bit off a little more than it could properly host when it offered up Dynamic. I'm guessing they were hoping to compete directly with Tumblr and Pinterest. So much for that.
The older I get the more I appreciate a simpler, less cluttered template, like the one I use for Prajer's Almanac or Sunset Appraisal. The text is marshaled down the centre, formatted well (I think) for things like tablets and flashy phones.
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