Tag: WordPress

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Meta Personal

Twenty Nineteen

Changing the look of my blog used to be something I loved to do, whether it was creating a new look from scratch or heavily customizing themes and templates I would find online. I’d do it on an almost seasonal basis. This “design” aspect of blogging is something I’ve lost interest in along the way, with the only thing keeping me going being the desire to write. For that reason, when I started blogging more heavily again a few years ago, I was fine with using the default “Twenty Fifteen” WordPress theme.

This past weekend when I went into the back-end to write a couple of posts, I saw I could upgrade to version 5 of WordPress — which I did — and with it came a brand new default theme, “Twenty Nineteen,” which is what you’re seeing now if you’re reading this post on my website. It’s simple and minimalist, which is how I like my design, with some nice typography, and so I’m happy to switch to it. I still want to customize it a bit more (just tweaks that are baked into the customization options), and will add a few new pages to flesh things out (like an “About” page, which I haven’t had for years).

Part of the customizable aspects of the new theme that I liked was to have a little tagline at the top, following the site’s title.

Blogging since 1998.

Writing that, I realized that I didn’t really commemorate the fact that as of last year, I have been blogging pretty regularly for over 20 years. The archives on this site go back to 2002 (this is the first post), but that just marks my start of using Blogger as a proper engine for my blog (which later changed to Movable Type, and then to WordPress).

My origins of writing regularly on the web started in 1998 (in the summer I think) when I launched a site to celebrate Acadian culture (the French-speaking culture from where I grew up), and as part of the content for the site I wrote a weekly column about my life in Japan (I had moved there in May of that year). That site lasted about 3 years, and since I wanted to continue writing regularly about my life in Tokyo, I launched my own site, jeansnow.net. For at least a year, I continued to write and code everything in HTML, until I came across this thing called Blogger that looked like a pretty great way to automate a lot of what I was doing.

And now, over 20 years later, here I am writing this post.

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Meta

7500

With this post that I put up on Friday, the site reached the rather handsome sum of 7500 posts (this very post is #7505).

I’ve never really paid attention to the number of overall posts on the site, but I just happened to notice this number in the WordPress admin dashboard, and thought it was worth sharing.

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Design Meta

Website Plumage

As I continue to go through and fix my archives — I didn’t do much over the past couple of weeks, but yesterday managed to get through a few more months in 2006 — I find it interesting to get glimpses of the various themes I used on the website over the years (courtesy of the Wayback Machine).

I used to modify my site fairly frequently, usually a few times a year — sometimes a major revamp, sometimes some simple tweaks and a change of colors.

Currently, what you’re seeing here, is the default WordPress theme for 2016.

This is interesting to me, because in the past I would never have gone so basic. I would have either spent time tweaking enough of it to give it its own look, or in the later years, would have spent a lot of time trying to find an interesting theme I could use (which I would still modify). But here, since I brought back the site to WordPress (after being archive-less on Tumblr for a couple of years), I did a bit of searching at first to see if I could find a nice free minimal theme I could use, but I didn’t really find anything I liked more than just this basic WP theme.

More than just not finding it a priority to spend time on the way the site looks — my focus at the moment is the content, both old and new — I’ve taken a liking to the very basicness and minimalism of this theme. It’s black & white — a color theme I’ve mostly stuck to since the late 2000s — and it doesn’t feel overly slick or fancy. It just presents the content with no fuss.

I’m sure I’ll eventually tire of it and will want to find something else to use — something that I can find “as is,” as I no longer have any desire to spend any time modifying the guts of a theme — but for now I’m happy to keep it this way.

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Meta

A Day’s Work

I just spent the entire day — over 12 hours — working on my site/blog. That may sound crazy, but it’s been a rather enjoyable experience.

The first half of the day was spent recreating posts that were missing from my archives (as I described in this post). Since then, I’ve been making my way through all of my posts, starting with the very first one in 2002, and re-inserting images/photos that I get from the Wayback Machine. I’ve just reached the end of 2003.

Yes, it’s long work, but the reason I’m still at it is because it’s turned out to be an amazing look back at what I was up to in those days, and how the site evolved and turned into the “design guide” that a lot of people remember, and which led to me eventually starting a career in writing.

The other fascinating thing is that I’m rediscovering things that I’ve done that I had completely forgotten about. Hey, a huge part of my site was a photolog called TB.Grafico — how do you forget that? And I’ve also realized that my Tokyo Boy moblog (oh yeah, short for “mobile blog,” that was a thing back in those days) actually ran on its own blog installation, and so has been basically unavailable online for years, even before I had my server issues (and I do plan on rescuing it once I’m done going through my regular posts). Oh, and I produced an ezine called Geisha, and right now I have no idea how to find any of the issues (at least 9 I think), or if there’s any chance that I’ll be able to dig up any of them.

This entire process is certainly going to take weeks, and I’m happily looking forward to it.

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Art Debaser Design Meta Uncategorized Web

Digging Through the Archives

At long last, my archives are back. Most of them at least.

Some of you may recall that back in early 2014, I had the great misfortune of the web host I was using pulling the rug from under me, which meant that my entire website — which dated back to 2002 — suddenly disappeared.

And I didn’t have proper backups.

Eventually I did find some SQL database backups from 2011, which meant that I could probably eventually try to reconstruct the site, and then do some digging through the Wayback Machine for the missing 3 years. But I was so disgusted with what had happened that I wasn’t looking to self-host something right away, and decided to just use Tumblr, which is what I had set up quickly to keep on writing.

Jump to now.

A friendly poke the other day from my old friend Craig Mod came my way. He mentioned that it was a shame that all those archives of me covering the art & design scene in Tokyo/Japan during the 2000s weren’t available online anymore, and I couldn’t agree more. It was the kick in the ass I needed to just go ahead and finally spend the time required to getting all of this back up and available for everyone. After a post on Facebook to enlist some aid on what to do with that old database, it was another old friend from my Tokyo days (Michael, an ex-AQ staffer who was a pro at wrangling WordPress) who helped me out — I ended up creating a locally-hosted WordPress blog on my laptop, managed to connect to that old database (after a few modifications), and now I’ve taken the step of self-hosting a blog again (using the quick-and-easy WordPress hosting by name.com, which is the company I use for my domain hosting).

So a first step has been done, and it’s what you now see here. As you can see in the sidebar to the right (at least for now, as I imagine I’ll eventually settle on another theme to use), you’ll find full archives of the site, from the very first post on September 4, 2002, going to August 2011, and then the posts from the new Tumblr-hosted site I had from March 2014.

(I actually started writing regularly on the web in 1998, in the form of weekly columns about my life in Tokyo, all coded in HTML, but that content may truly be gone for good.)

Unfortunately, none of the images from those posts made it over — although I may still have some I can manage to add, as I found an old folder with a good amount of them — and I still need to try and find those 3 years of missing posts (as I mentioned, fingers crossed that I’ll be able to find them through the Wayback Machine).

But at least for now, it sure feels good to have a lot of this stuff online again, and I’ve been having a blast going back and randomly reading old posts. It reveals a younger me who is so excited by what he’s experiencing, deliciously naive (in a fun way).

Digital diaries from the Japanese front.

Categories
Magazines Meta Technology Web

The Magaziner

I gotta say I’m getting a kick out of this: In the past 24 hours I conceived of a site, a name, bought the domain, got it working, installed WordPress, imported posts from this site, found a theme that I modded to my liking, and have now launched my latest project, something I’m calling The Magaziner. What’s a magaziner you ask? Here’s my made-up answer:

We hereby define a new term, that of the magaziner, described as a person who exerts an unhealthy amount of love for all things magazine. The Magaziner is a site that mostly focuses on the intersection between magazines and the digital frontier, and what it means for the medium. This does not preclude the inclusion of a healthy amount of print love.

It all started last night when I was reading a comment on Facebook by Craig Mod, who suggested that all of the magazine-related coverage I’ve been doing over the past couple of months is getting lost within the rest of what I post here. I think he made a good point — and god knows I have a lot of respect and admiration for what he’s accomplished over the past year or so — and so I decided to launch a new site that would be exclusively for all of the magazine stuff. Expect the same kind of coverage you’ve been seeing here — commentary, news, new release announcements, reviews — that weighs heavily on the emerging digital side of the magazine publishing industry, something I’m quite passionate about (although I do still love my lovely print publications, thank you very much).

So this site returns to being a hub for news on me and all of my various projects, which on top of The Magaziner includes Codex, my new weekly music podcast, Radio OK Fred, SNOW Magazine, PauseTalk, and other fun stuff. Hope you’ll continue to follow what I’m up to here, and if you really enjoyed the magazine coverage, then please head on over to The Magaziner — and you can of course subscribe to an RSS feed. There’s a Twitter account too (@the_magaziner) that I’ll be using to post magazine-related news as well.

Oh, and one more thing about The Magaziner, please consider this a beta version of the site. As I said at the top of this post, it all came together rather fast, so over the coming weeks I’m sure I’ll be changing things here and there, fixing things I missed, and maybe coming up with new features or sections to add.

Categories
Design Web

iA3 WordPress Theme

Information Architects (iA) has begun selling the template for its site as a proper WordPress theme, and is using a “dynamic pricing” strategy to determine the selling price — they talk more about the strategy here. It’s currently selling for $33, but that will be for the first 100 purchases only, which will be followed by a price adjustment.