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Attention conservation notice: A new blogger with a "perfect" blog in town
Designing a personal blog on Internet 2.0 seems an easy task as one can choose among various existing themes. However, choosing a template and modifying it to make it look like your perfect place on the internet is a nightmare. I have been playing with the design of my static website for a couple of weeks and it is very addictive. The first version was similar to my Cosma's weblog but it was quite messy with a lot of clutter. So after making fewer modifications and doing comparisons with other fellow bloggers, I decided to go for something unique. Accordingly, I went for the bootstrap-386 theme--the current one--which has a style of ancient DOS computers of 1986. The beautiful blue background was eye-catching and able to express my nerdiness. After making some further changes I successfully--after two attempts--added my own guestbook.
The current theme looks cute but the urge to make it perfect never goes away, I guess. Most of the time I dwell between writing a blog post or modify my blog to make it look heavenly. If I give too much time to modify, I criticize myself that I could have written a blog post. This criticism aligns well with Jatan's comment in People and Blogs interview--hosted by Manu--in which he mentioned that the looks of the blog matters a little less than the material it provides. However, other bloggers such as Ava seem to contradict the argument of Jatan. Ava has a beautiful website which has gone through at least a couple of major iterations. This contradiction suggests that the design of your blog also depends on the audience. If you write for yourself then the design matters, but if you write for others then the material it provides is important.
After so much scholarly discussion, I can not promise that I won't change the design of my blog but for sure I will focus more on writing.
Another interest of mine is self-hosting my website, which I found to be an amazing idea. Although my website seems to be running pretty fine, I still want to feel an illusion of full control by self-hosting it. This illusion convinced me to invest in purchasing a Raspberry Pi 5 which is a perfect pocket-size computer and I am not scared of breaking it. I plan to host my blog on Pi by running Pybloxsom on it. If it works then I do not need to convert my blog to static html pages.
Despite having such appealing dreams, setting up Pi is not easy, and, therefore, it is still in progress. I will talk about it some other day. But I am already using Pyblosxom and currently running my blog--yes this one you are reading--with its help. Pybloxsom is a powerful tool written in Python and inspired by its grandfather, Bloxsom which is just a Perl script that can convert text files to HTML pages and can manage to run whole blogs from a single Perl script.
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Posted at: Sun, 09 Feb 2025 23:00 GMT
category: /weblog/posts