God knows I'm not very technically savvy. The level of knowledge I possess about how technology of any kind works and can be used is pretty pathetic, especially by comparison to so many of the people I spend time with. But one thing I've always been pretty proud of is I'm not half bad, when given a decent chunk of time, at messing around with a computer program until I figure out how to more or less use it and make it do what I want.
Today I was messing around with Blogger. I've been toying with the idea of keeping a freestanding blog in addition to this Livejournal, with content mostly the same but geared less toward people who know me personally and more toward the public at large, taking a more "article" approach for the format and not so much a diary. I would post mostly only my rants, musings, projects and the like, but not so much the stuff I did this past weekend. Since I've had a Blogger site that I've mostly used as a mirror of this LJ for use in cross-posting to Google Buzz (never did manage to get the LJ-cross-posting-to-Buzz to function) I thought it might be worth messing around with that to see if I could get it to look the way I wanted.
Basically I wanted to construct a widget that would let me divide my writing into broader categories of my interests-- larp, cooking, writing, theater, culture and criticism, that sort of thing --and have icons across the top of the page leading to posts on each particular subject. The closest I could manage in Blogger to that was to construct original HTML widgets that allowed me to link an image to a particular tag page on the journal in a left-side column. This is imperfect, as I wanted to cull only certain entries from within those tags and also combine certain other tags under new headings, which this doesn't allow. I suppose I could re-tag everything, but that would be labor-intensive and make these icons redundant with the tag system.
What I have right now I kind of like, but as I said I'm dissatisfied. The header image definitely needs tweaking, and as I said my categorizing is not quite what I want. I'll have to mess around with it more. And this is still just basically a mirror of my LJ. Perhaps I'll just reorganize everything and actually bother to re-tag if I make a more "general-audience" version of the blog. I know you can tag things and make those tags invisible in Blogger, which might eliminate the redundancy problem. For now I'm just experimenting with the setup, and seeing if I can use the conveniently already-existing Blogger technology to accomplish what I want.
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