State of the Union...

It wasn't that I didn't want to do this anymore, but more that I wanted it to be better. Or more interesting. At the very least I wanted it to be better presented. I know how to do a lot of things but I don't know how to make a web site, not without the help of templates or simple online editing tools.

I visited wix.com and made a whole new site there. Wix doesn't have a spell check feature so I had to use Word to write my entries and copy and paste the words into Wix if I wanted to be sure everything was spelled right. Fortunately I'm a good speller and did the opposite, wrote in Wix and copied and pasted the text into Word to check it, and all was good. Still, it's nice to see the little red wigglies under a word as you make the mistake because, well, I type fast, and my fingers are the size of sausages, and I'm human, and I make mistakes.

Wix started to do quirky things like delete text I'd enter in a post. It would still be there in the editor but then it would be gone on the web page. And it would hold onto template backgrounds, pictures from the starting template, when I'd switch to mobile mode to see what it would look like on a smart phone. The editor would say I had to go back to the web format to make a change to the background that would be automatically carried over to the mobile format. I changed it twice, it didn't update the mobile format. Random deleted text, no spell check, no control over the mobile site background, done with Wix after 3 days of messing around with it trying different templates and designs. Sadly, the quirks don't show up until you've created half a dozen entries and pages and then surf through them all in preview mode, and then spend hours trying to figure out what you put into the draft didn't show up on the preview mode.

Squarespace next. Three different templates later and it won't let me fudge with the details I want to fudge with, it changes the size of my photographs, and puts headers where I don't want them. I'm sure there's a way to manipulate the code, if I knew how to code, but it would swap where photos were, make them different sizes in the same entry, it kind of looked better and worse at the same time. And it was kind of expensive on a monthly basis for something I was doing for shits and giggles, and not for profit. It's probably a good tool if you have a small business and just want a web presence. Your stuff will fit into their templates, but you can't be picky.

And then Wordpress. Again, heavily template based. I'm too much of a control freak to let the editor tell me what I have to do. It would insert bits of information that I didn't want in the post, and make the images smaller than I wanted, and generally looked uninspired.

They all had potential, and I'm sure they all had their pluses, but none were quite right for what I wanted, which I didn't think was that complicated.

I was excited about making a change to this project, this thing. Instead I'm writing way too many words explaining something that doesn't really need explaining. And I guess for a little while longer I'll be here on Blogger.