I haven’t told anyone about this blog yet. I have another blog that is also under wraps at the moment. Why wouldn’t I tell anyone about my blogs? Mostly because I am embarrassed by how they look and function.

Most normal people who want to blog just sign up for Blogger or, if they’re using WordPress like me, they maybe upload a custom header on a template they like and start writing. It’s just. not. that. easy. for me.

I know enough to be dangerous with websites, and I generally know how I want the websites and blogs that I create to look. But I spend a lot of time fiddling with code or images to get things perfect, and then I get frustrated when they don’t turn out the way I want them. Or I go back and don’t like what I did that I thought was brilliant at the time. It’s very frustrating. And while I’m generally comfortable with how I write, I don’t want my writing to be displayed in a haphazard internet location. It’s like sending someone to an art gallery in a dingy, cluttered basement with crappy lighting. It really distracts from the experience.

Oh god, the experience. Fucking background in marketing seeps through in really annoying ways.

There’s also a lot of pressure to blog regularly once you start a blog and people start reading. Knowing that people are reading will also mold the way I write. That’s just the way it is. Those two things, combined with self-doubt, crippled my previous blogs. But I’m working to overcome my fear of failure and be more successful this time around. What kind of successful is a good question—I would like this blog to be an intimate, personal place to share the things I care about with friends whom I know and trust; I also fantasize about it being a wildly popular blogger-tells-all blog with a self-supporting revenue stream. I simultaneously want both and neither. Why am I even here? Oh, and perhaps now you (future reader, if it ever gets to that point) can catch a glimpse into that spiral of self-destructive thinking that I call home.

Moving forward. On this blog right now, I hate the way the free theme I chose shows 5-line excerpts on the main page instead of the full post or at the very least a longer excerpt. I also don’t really like the organization. Maybe this isn’t the right theme for me, after all. I could re-use the banner in a different theme. Or create my own… which leads me to a minorly proud moment that I will share with nobody and/or you, future reader.

I took on a freelance project recently that was slightly over my head: converting a basic website to the WordPress platform. I said yes because I knew that the challenge was something that I could conquer with a degree of effort. Though the stress made me want to scrape out my eyeballs and grind my heart into hamburger, I finished successfully. The basic conversion was manageable because a designer had already passably converted the original Photoshop design into HTML and CSS… I had to make some tweaks to split everything into parts that make sense with WordPress (header, footer, sidebar). The surprise challenge came from implementing a custom search box. I’ve only used the stock search box via the widget section in the past. It was a learning experience that makes me feel more confident overall—I even got cocky and customized the search results page. Crazy.

This was all good for helping me figure out why I’m so unhappy with the way my new, unpromoted blogs look and feel. First of all, I approached them with the haphazard “Imma just start a blog” blogger mentality. That is not the type of person I am. I hold a BA in creative writing and a BS in digital media; I have been trained to write well and to design well. The hang-up comes from me not living up to the standards which I’ve arbitrarily set for myself based on my training. I’m beyond the academic concepts of success—I don’t think I need to publish a literary novel and win the Nobel prize to be considered a good writer, nor do I feel the need to follow strict interaction design process for every website I create. I’ve just had trouble translating my classically-trained ideas of success into something more practical.

So, I’m setting new goals to help me get to the point of sharing what I write here with other people, based loosely on principles outlined in* The Elements of User Experience by Jesse James Garrett.

1. Define structure of pages outside of the WordPress blog loop
2. Sketch some layout ideas by hand
3. Create an image in Photoshop of what I want my blog to look like (home page, individual post page, category page if applicable, and search results page to start).
4. Convert the Photoshop image into HTML and CSS, optimizing for structure of a bare-bones WordPress theme
5. Create the WordPress theme and install on my blog

I don’t know. I might actually get somewhere with this if I can separate it into bite-size chunks on my to-do list. Someday, nobody, you might be somebody. Maybe even someday soon.

*This is the place where I was writing when I spilled a glass of water over my keyboard like a Boss. I had to finish typing this entry using Ben’s keyboard. It’s black and the buttons are so big… unlike my lovely slim white key on aluminum Apple keyboard. Sadface.