Most of my regular readers don’t care about the intricacies of blog publishing systems, CSS, templates and all that jazz. That’s why I won’t bore you with it. Let’s just say that I will be toying with a few new design ideas over the next few days, so in case you think my site looks like shit, you may well be right.

When today I thought about last year’s summer, where I did more or less the same work at The Factory as I’ve done this year and will be doing for yet another week, I remembered that it must have been approximately a year ago that I switched to Wordpress. Now, Wordpress may be a mere weblog publishing script, but for me, switching to Wordpress meant changing quite a few things. Let’s see what they are:

* About a year ago, my weblog was hosted on my university’s server. Reliable, but lacking support for things such as PHP or MySQL (which are mandatory for Wordpress).

* I did have a domain, but it simply redirected to my university webspace. So, no direct links, etc.

* I was running on Greymatter, a blog publishing script which didn’t require a database or PHP. It was reliable, easy to install, and I was quite satisfied with what it did. Unfortunately, I tend to become restless and want to move on as soon as something works smoothly enough.

Well, about a year ago I decided that I just wouldn’t be able to satisfy my need for a change without chipping in a few Euros, so I rented some webspace which supported PHP, MySQL and a slew of other cool things. And I haven’t looked back since. Today my site sports clean, direct links, I have a blogroll, and my site is listed in about 3 million different blog directories.

While thinking about these changes today, I also decided to dig into the past a bit more and visited the Wayback machine in order to check out my old designs. I did uncover my site design from pre-Wordpress times (which was frames, tables and all the other things webdesign gurus say you shouldn’t use…but still looked quite cool). But what really fascinated me the moment I laid eyes on these old designs was how in retrospect my writing seems so much better. What the hell happened to me? Did I go to university for ages just to be beat in a writing battle by a younger version of myself? Let’s just take this very example, written on the 1st of February 2003:

After being in the weblogwriter business for quite a while now, I can conclude the following:

* It takes a shitload of time to write something which is more than just incoherent babble. That’s why this fucking entry took me about three hours already.
* Writing more than just incoherent babble is senseless, because nobody ever takes the time to read it anyways.
* A lack of porn or links to stupid E/N sites results in a lack of visitors.
* A lack of visitors isn’t that bad, since visitors either demand more links or more porn (Not really a conclusion, rather an educated guess, because I never had any links or porn, so nobody can demand more…I’m the master of logic)
* Trying to pretend I have something to say always results in things like this stupid compilation here.

Actually, I once again succeeded in beeing really boring, resembling a genuine and dedicated weblog writer. This webpage turned me into a complete and utter idiot.

And this, dear reader, is the magic of the Internet.

Have a nice day

Sure, it’s a bit overly zealous in its attempt to be funny, but overall, that writing is much better than anything I’ve written in ages. And there’s plenty more I wrote during that time which is just like it. Ladies and gentleman, I’ve lost my stride. About three years ago.

And to conclude this sad entry, I will come back to the points I elaborated on in the first part. I did rent webspace. I did install a more advanced blogging software. I did learn quite a few things about designs via templates, CSS and whatnot. But did it improve my writing? Did it improve the one thing that is vital to any blog, namely its content? Fuck no, it didn’t.