so josh comments on my last post, wherein i say that i redesigned my blog, and he says:

Hey Kynthia! I’m digging the new look. I’m actually trying to redesign my site at the moment, but i can’t figure out how to meld my changes with the WordPress file structures….how’d you do it? Thanks!

when i read this, i go (in my head):

Hey Josh! Good to hear from you! I read your post the other day about how you are building your own theme, and yeah, it’s rather confusing to start from scratch. I cheat by starting with a working theme, editing the stylesheet, and then changing things that break, erasing stuff I don’t need, and adding any other stuff piece by piece as it occurs to me. Then I only have to learn about a few things at a time, but I eventually figure out how all the pieces come together. Or at least that’s the theory. :)

as i started to translate my thoughts into text for the comment box, however (is anyone else fascinated by the fact that i apparently think with appropriate capitalization? and hyperlinks?!), i hesitated, because i really wasn’t sure that he would come back to read the answer, so i wondered if i should email him instead, and while i was thinking about it i got distracted by shortbread or hollyoaks or something.

i was lucky enough to have him catch me on IM later, though, so that was good.

i probably would have forgotten about it if i wasn’t in a spring cleaning mode already, and if i hadn’t had a similar thought a week or so ago, when first my mom and then philip asked me about a gapingvoid comic that i said i thought was funny.

after my mom’s comment, i was like, ok, i should try to reply to that… but then that whole shortbread thing happened again, and i forgot about it until philip’s comment reminded me to be less of an asshole and say something even though i was afraid of sounding pretentious because, seriously, talking about why i think something is funny?! when the something involves (hushed voice, so technorati can’t hear me) web 2.0?!

i’m just sayin… i don’t have enough moleskine wrappers to send away for an official beret and black turtleneck, and don’t tell anyone, but i’m probably just going to give up early and use dum dum wrappers to get a yo-yo instead.

i like yo-yos.

but ok, in all seriousness, i think there’s a real issue here, but i also know that there are solutions in the works. a while back i signed up with a startup called cocomment that is supposed to help you keep track of all your ongoing commentversations (if i just made that word up, i am really, really sorry…), but it didn’t work the first few times i tried to use it, so i gave up.

it’s a jungle out there, what can i say.

but there’s another option that doesn’t involve outside intervention.

have you seen that little checkbox on some blogs that says something like “email me if someone replies to this thread”? it’s far from a perfect solution if you’re one of those people that gets 700 comments a day that say things like:

dahlingk, you are fahhbulous!!! thanx 4 being u!

because anyone masochistic enough to read all of those is probably going to read them whether they are delivered to their inbox or not, so energy should be focused elsewhere.

but for my own case, it would be just fine, really, and so i decided to be temporarily satisfied with imperfection, and i went plugin searching, and installed this.

so now i have my own little checkbox.

and telling you that was the catalyst for the introduction of all the rest of this babble into the world.

which is why i don’t blog more often when i think “how could that possibly take more than a paragraph?”

sigh

anyway, you don’t have to tell me whether you want to use the checkbox or not.

just, well, use it or not.

and we’ll see what happens.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 30th, 2006 at 4:38 pm and is filed under things i do. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.