The High Wood

Pamela’s publishers decided that we had to change her website (www.castingstrilogy.com). Specifically they wanted an RSS feed for her updates. Better have a blog, they said.

Well, I’m not a great fan of blogs as a way of getting across anythiing except ephemera. I believe a website needs to be a little more solid. And yet it is a good idea for announcements and sundry musings be available on a feed.

So I’ve ended up building a half-blog half-website. I’m actually quite pleased with the results. The front page is a blog and there are links to essentially ephemeral groups entries - Reviews, Interviews and Events/Appearances - which are handled by the blog. But the more solid stuff like details of the books and biographical info are real webpages.

Technically I could use blog ‘pages’ to do this as well but it is much harder to deal with them hierarchically and I like the extra bit of freedom that comes from making your own pages.

I am sufficiently pleased with the concept that I will be doing something similar with my own commercial website which will appear when I actually get my book published. Which is another story.

We’ll see if the concept survives real-world use.

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One of the more agreeable tasks with a new blog is choosing the theme.

In a fit of hubris, I took the WordPress Classic and tried to modify it to be what I wanted. I would recommend this exercise to anyone who wants to know just how limited their knowledge of stylesheets really is.

Friend Scott Westerfeld (New York Times bestselling author) has a very nifty theme which you can see at scottwesterfeld.com/blog. It is very Scott and not really suitable for me but it pointed me at the ‘Kubrick’ family of themes.

Seaside, by Taylor Pullen, rather appealed to me. Perhaps a little on the pastel side but releaxing and peaceful. Nice one, Taylor.

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Back in the Cretaceous period there were no blogs. Then, sometime in the late Quaternary the first blog crawled out of the MUD and developed legs.

Evolution was rapid. Blogs bred and mutated to occupy every environmental niche on the web. Some acquired wings, some acquired fur, some even acquired stupidity. There was a niche for everyone.

But there were two clouds on the horizon.

First, the population expanded exponentially. More and more blogs were being forced to share the same ideas. Intellectual space became limited, forcing out the less aggressive blogs.

Second, and far more serious, was Febrile Warming. As more and more TLAs were released into the iconosphere ideas became trapped and a positive feedback mechanism started to heat brains all over the planet. Cold certainties began to melt into the Oceans of Ignorance. The Intellectual Gulf stream was pushed south and warm fuzzy thoughts were diverted away from Europe and back towards the New World.

And still more and more blogs poured out, choking thought in a deluge of persiflage.

Just like this one, really.

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