A New Blag

I have dedicated an entire new blag to my love for grammar. I affectionately call it “Grammar Camp”

I Don’t Have Anything To Say

…But I’ve noticed that frequently updating my site yields more page views, and I’m a sucker for statistics.

Silliness

WordPress offers a number of site statistics, including “Most Visited Page.” Currently, my most visited page is my review of ratatouille. This is “silliness” because one of the top web searches that has led people to my page is “ratatouille-disney-film,” which means presumably people are reading the post because they expect it to be a review of the 2007 Pixar film, not a review of a really old French dish.

This is made sillier by the fact that the post doesn’t contain lots of keywords that you would expect of a review of the film. It doesn’t have words like pixar, disney, film, movie, cartoon or talking rat. It has words like zucchini, bell peppers and potatoes. So if you’ve somehow accidentally arrived at this blog in search of a review of the film, look elsewhere. You will not find one here.

WordPress

I’m relatively new to this phenomenon known as “blogging,” and as such have little to no knowledge of what constitutes a good “CMS.” In fact, only yesterday did I even learn that the acronym CMS is short for “content management system” and not, as I’d previously thought, “criminally malicious squirrels.”

Seriously, though. I began my journey through the blogosphere from Google’s Blogger. I personally am a Google fanatic and take any criticism directed at them much more personally than they probably do. So Blogger seemed like a natural place to start, and for a time, all was well in the verdant pastures of my brain as I typed out obfuscated reviews of products so old or obscure that no one would bother to read them.

But then, as it happened, a friend of mine is who quite accomplished in the Art Of Blogging, dropped the term CMS in an AIM-chat. I read about content management systems on Wikipedia and understood for the first time that perhaps there is something in this blogosphere that equals — nay, surpasses — Blogger in quality.

With the naiive intent of broadening my horizons, I dove head-first into the lands of the proprietary CMS’s. Though I quickly fled from this region of the sphere due to none-too-subtle signs that I would have to be spending a lot of money, I did have time to watch a few screencasts of people doing things with their blogs that I’d never even dreamed of hoping to dream of doing with mine.

Thus it was decided. I would move my entire blog to another blogging site that provided a more professional, but still free, CMS. And so I am here on WordPress, fresh off the sphere-boat, as it were, from Blogger, and just beginning to explore what I hope will prove to be a treasure-trove of new blogging goodies.

First Impressions

I discovered, while in the confused and easily impressionable state (caused not only by the fact that I was turning my understanding of the blogging world upside-down, but also because I was doing it at 3 am), that WordPress genuinely wants you to have an easy time getting your blog written. Of course that’s a common goal of all these sorts of sites, but between the short and to-the-point signup page and the “import blog” button that required all of ten seconds for me to import my entire blog from blogger, I realized that things here at WordPress are uncommonly efficient.

As I’ve said, I have yet to explore all of the features WordPress has to offer, so I’m hoping that this outer efficiency isn’t a veil for some hidden shortcomings. I don’t think it is, though. I’ve already sifted through dozens of different themes that are far more creative than anything Blogger has to offer.

“Themes?” You might ask, “Aren’t themes kind of… superficial?” Yes, they are. But recall that blogging essentially amounts to writing text and publishing it to the web. Besides this text, the only thing that distinguishes one blog from another is how the blog looks. And since we live in such a superficial society anyway, having a pretty blog is a big step towards having a good blog.

Beyond the themes, I haven’t really noticed a drastic difference in features yet. I’m just hoping that someting shiny and sparkly will jump out at me and make me love WordPress. Time will tell…

A Note On TLDR

I want it to be known that the TLDR (“Too Long, Didn’t Read” you stupid noob) versions of my reviews are too be taken with a grain of salt. Specifically: the categories and numbers are largely arbitrary and have only a loose foundation in reality.

I make an effort to provide a useful “Overall” score, and some of the categories are important. Just remember that the real review is in the long version of the text.

I guess if you’re too lazy to read a full review you deserve to be misled anyway. Noob.