Creating a New Blog
Let’s start by introducing myself a wee bit: My name is Chris Cardinal. I was a major contributor to Gizmodo for about six months, an apprentice beneath the hilarious and completely disjointed ways of Joel Johnson while he was still the Gizmodo editor. I covered E3 next to Joel for both Gizmodo and Kotaku and in my time at Gawker Media learned a lot about the “high art” that some people consider blogging to be. (And which others consider a “fad,” or to some, a means for giving people who have no place in speaking a voice.)
Yes, many an IM conversation with my editor would begin with “hey douche, you need to use &emdash; stop no double spacing after periods. you’re not writing on a Royal 10.” Nonetheless, I had a certain stylistic convention etched into my mind that I found works quite nicely when actually adhered to.
Utter Sarcasm is my attempt at a personal blog, with a few twists. For one, it will be co-authored by my close friend Tony Nelson. Also, we’re going to attempt to do a dualing-blog design, with two separate running columns of content. I’ve not yet seen such a design working in practice, but it’s an awfully big Internet out there, and I haven’t honestly looked that hard. (This may be simply because it’s not an intelligent design, but I’m stubborn enough to try anyway.)
I also have determined that I will blog my journey in creating this blog. A little bit of background might be useful right about here, as well:
A little more than two years ago, I decided that I wanted to finally hunker down and learn how to develop database-driven applications. My entire knowledge of programming had been skimmed from an ActionScript book, (ActionScript being the Macromedia Flash control language, and not exactly a good core language to learn on) but I was armed with a few WebMonkey tutorials and decided to give it a go.
The result was Originality Is Overrated, a site I quickly turned into a public journaling site. I realized that my friends, none of whom were yet into blogging or journaling in any form, were much more likely to read my material if they were able to contribute their own, and so they did. It was a harrowing lesson of PHP and MySQL and everything in between, but I had a free web hosting connection and ran with it.
Actually, while seeking out help with PHP, I found my business partner and we now own and manage a web application development firm called Synapse Studios.
But that’s all relatively beside the point.
Now, I’ll chronicle the creation and birthing of this blog. I’ve been examining a few routes to take. For one thing, OIO was built on a poorly-coded framework, and designed more as a journaling site, and not a blog. The keen distinctions there are a decided lack of trackbacks, tags, excerpt/full post-capabilities and probably most importantly, RSS. I’ve been looking around and I’ve discovered that WordPress is a pretty strong, open source blog application that may provide me with the framework I need while still allowing me enough flexibility in the code to tack on my own new features.
Then again, I may just scrap this altogether. In the coming days, we’ll see which route I decide to go. I’m well aware of the fact that no one really knows this site exists yet, so I think I’ll cover networking and distribution in my next piece, including a fun foray into del.iciou.us, technorati, and the few other sites out there that help us find good reading material.
Other things to consider:
Cross-linking/auto-redirecting from Blogger?
Subdomains for *just* Tony or *just* my posts?
Integrating OIO users for comments system while still allowing comments to remain anonymous?
Dynamic cuts using div’s with lotsa Javascript?
We shall see…
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