Another day, another blog. Well — I’m not quite that bad. I have a livejournal, but I use that more for incoherent rants and Seekrits. I have All The Modern Things, my Wikimedia/wiki blog, but it has a very specific remit. I have a micro-blog, but, well, I don’t even need to explain the limitations of that. And I’m finding more and more that I would like to write up my explorations into programming and tech, so that’s what this is. Unashamedly geek central.
It’s not too surprising that I just returned from LCA. There’s nothing like a week of seriously geeking out to inspire you to finally get projects happening.
Setting up a new blog requires 4 initial decisions:
- Domain
- Name
- Platform
- Design.
(Oh and Purpose. But see above for that.)
Domain was easy since I had bought laugher.id.au a while ago and not yet used it for much beyond my parents’ travel blog. The name is a (hopefully recognisable) play on the word taciturn. Already it has the ideas of technology and linguistics, so that’s a good start.
The platform was also pretty easy. Like All The Modern Things I used Textpattern. It’s easy to install, but not easy to install themes, but I know from experience that once the design is set up everything after that is easy. I could probably use Wordpress, but I am used to using markup instead of WYSIWYG etc.
Since design is not my forte, I spent some time scouting out FreeCSSTemplates and Open Source Web Design (FCT is better about having an explicit license than OSWD is, despite OSWD’s superior name). I went for one that is somehow “content centred”, that is there is very little to distract you from reading the main stuff. Although it is fixed-width rather than fluid/liquid which is a little disappointing, but sure makes a consistent look easier. Spent a while fiddling with the colour scheme, and voila. I do all this knowing that probably 99% of readers will never look at the site more than once, thanks to the wonders of RSS, but I will look at it, so I may as well make it something I can stand.
I still have a few things to set up, such as tags and an archive, but I can write stuff and it doesn’t look ridiculous, so yay.
Thus is born Techiturn. Coming soon… LCA reports.
