Blurry Words has long lain dormant while dust and comments of porn links and penis enlargement offers settled on its inanimate frame. The posts have grown stale, and an overwhelming stench hangs in the air. It’s either decay, or…no, it’s definitely decay.
Deep in the bowels of the site a furnace roars to life. Blasts of heat and power roar through the outer extremities. Lights begin to flicker. An old timey record player can be heard in the distant as it slowly begins to play NSync’s, “Bye, Bye, Bye”. Blurry Words arises from its indefinite slumber.
Welcome to the Halloween relaunch of Blurry Words. It feels good to be back. I hope you didn’t miss me too much. The archives say that the last time I posted it was October of last year. Younglings have this innate capability to torpedo pretty much anything; all with a smile, or a laugh, or a steaming pile of unmentionable in their diaper.
Beyond that, I’ve been extremely busy. Work. School even. Some play. A good video game will trump a new blog post nine times out of ten. But now I’m recommitted. I have my wife to thank for that. She threatened to disallow the auto-renewal of my server space to take place. This immediately awoke the five year old version of me inhabiting my subconscious. Because, even though I’m not interested in it right now…actually, I am interested in it right now. Give it back.
It’ll be good to get back to writing posts. I really enjoyed scraping them together back when I was actively spewing. I found it fulfilling and surprisingly beneficial. My writing skills got better; something that was noticeable at the day job. My fingers were able to express ideas that my mouth just couldn’t. That mouth of mine; it’s pretty horrible at the whole communicating thing.
But lately, I’ve felt the writing skills slipping. Composing technical specs and impact analyzing was becoming a less fluid process. My writing muscles have digressed in to a soft, mushy mess around my mid-section. It’s time to hit the gym.
If you’ve been to BW before, you might’ve noticed that the site got a bit of a redesign. I’ve spent the last few weeks banging the dust off, hanging up some air freshener, and basically just revitalizing the ol’ stomping ground. I ripped out her previous engine (WordPress), which was more of a hindrance to my process than anything else, and replaced it with a kick ass little tool that does everything I need in a way that I seem to enjoy (Jekyll).
As I said, the layout and visual design is completely revamped. My goal was to simplify and have a clean reading area for the posts. I recently read through Chuck Klosterman’s Esquire archive. The thing about Esquire’s site is that it is horrendous for reading articles. There’s animated ads flashing away on the right, a noisy side bar to the left; it’s a horrible experience. So, I started opening up the articles in their provided Print view. Much better. That’s how articles are meant to be read on the internet. And even though the old BW design was nowhere near the travesty that Esquire’s is, I feel really good about this new one.
So there you have it. Blurry Words, back in action. Hopefully I can avoid all this Meta conversation in the foreseeable future and just bang out some interesting posts. Until then, enjoy Klosterman’s Esquire articles, if you haven’t already.
