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applejosh

Update

  • Ch-ch-changes

    So I've been playing around with themes some more today, despite thinking I was in a good status quo space. So I put this one on. Kind of a large change. I'll probably keep it for a while, making tweaks to it, and see where that gets me. It renders ok on mobile/tablet as well as full computer screen, so it seems to be a good base to use. Other thing that I'll be tweaking/changing is the whole category versus tag thing. I'm not sure how I want to organize everything. Makes it a little difficult to come up with a structure when I have no idea what it is I need to prop up. Once I get a decent set of posts and decide how I want to organize the lot, I might play around with the front page. Maybe actually have one instead of just a list of posts. But we'll see. There's something about just starting out with a list of the only content on this site. If anyone has any topics they would like me to consider, drop them in the comments.

    Other things I need to do is get more familiar with Wordpress and the various plugins and such that seemed to get installed when I clicked the "one step install" for setting up the site. Not sure if I want to try and keep close to stock, or if I want to see if the plugins actually help with anything. I had a plugin that was for writing pages and posts that I originally thought was the "stock" one, but upon further inspection, I found the "standard" one. It loads a heck of a lot faster when clicking on the add post button. I also want to see about enabling some plugins to make this site more performant. This is not a dedicated server or anything; it is shared hosting. It was kind of hard to justify anything more when I have not shown a dedication to posting, and I don't expect a lot of traffic.

    Other than that, not a whole lot happened today. My main accomplishment was a killer nap in the morning. I napped the heck out of it. I actually do feel a little proud about it. My knee hasn't changed much since yesterday. It's still sore. It's still swollen. It's still stiff. Guessing I won't be getting that "everything is perfect overnight" miracle. It was a long shot.

    And as is tradition, here is a dog picture for making it through the post.

  • Recovery

    I had minor arthroscopic knee surgery on Friday, so I've been in a recovery mode the past couple days. It's going OK. It's still swollen quite a bit, and it hurts more than when I went in. It's expected. I'm to try and walk as I feel ok with it. Basically, I'm walking quite a bit because the house is not exactly crutch friendly. I do break them out early in the morning when the knee is really stiff and moving it is uncomfortable. I'm also to do straight leg lifts, and get on a stationary bike when I feel up to it. Only hiccup in that is I don't have a stationary bike of any kind. But otherwise I hope I'm on a road to recovery.

    I've passed the time by, you guessed it, working on this site and trying to figure out an online presence of some sort. My involvement of working on this site involved trying out a lot of pre-configured free themes. I'm not going to invest in any paid themes based on what I've done in the past. I have to prove to myself that I'll actually use this for an extended period of time. In the old days, I'd spend a lot of time working on actual HTML code, diving into CSS and other things of the time. I just don't have as much time nowadays. I want things to pretty much just work.

    I've also added a "microblog" to the equation. It can be accessed via the link in the sidebar header/footer, but right now, it's hardly anything. The intent is to use it similar to what Twitter is used for, but without all the ads, toxic posts, controversy, and billionaire oligarchs. Is it as useful as I found Twitter? No, but to be honest I needed to step away from that a bit. I'll still scroll through my Twitter feed occasionally, but I'm also muting and unfollowing accounts that I just find tedious. It should be better for my mental wellbeing. This blog should also be kind of therapeutic if I do it correctly.

    And as a reward for actually reading all the way through this, here's a dog.

    Dog with toy

  • It's a start

    With the whole kerfuffle over on Wordpress.com, I’ve moved to a self-hosted solution that is 1) much cheaper (even after the promotional deal ends), and 2) more flexible (which is kind of a hindrance right now because too many options and ones that require me to actually know something about Wordpress in general). So, I’ve started with this particular theme, which I’m not overly thrilled with, but it works for now. I’ll probably be testing/trying various things over the coming couple days (maybe weeks), so if things radically change, don’t be surprised. If you absolutely hate something, drop it in the comments. But I have a feeling that things will be changing frequently (depending on my busy schedule of napping after surgery, etc.) and maybe radically, so don’t get too attached to anything quite yet. I’m still experimenting.

    While I don’t see this particular medium being a replacement for my scintillating twitter posts (I’m not saying that I contributed to the cesspool that is twitter, but I didn’t exactly raise the bar, either), but I hope at least to post here more regularly than once a year. Maybe include some pictures, etc. Kind of treating it like a public facing journal, maybe with some other stuff thrown in. At least for now.

     

  • Just Getting Started

    So, this is just the beginning. I will likely be tweaking, adjusting, or outright completely redoing this site as my familiarity of WordPress and its editing capabilities increases. While this will likely never be a hotbed of exciting and fascinating posts and pictures, it may end up having something of interest.