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| Yes, that is Marley and Me in the background. |
My apologies to anyone setting down here briefly over the next couple of weeks. Having gone AWOL from the blogging scene for roughly ten months (not entirely of my own choosing), and after weeks of telling myself that I just needed to jump back into it, I finally ran smack-dab into yesterday.
Luckily, yesterday was a Saturday, so I had the time I needed to deal with what I found when I opened up Blogger for the first time in ages. If it had been a weekday, I would have been in trouble. I would have gone to work thinking about everything I needed to do on Blogger instead of concentrating on my job (and right now, concentration is rather the most important weapon in my work arsenal, given that we are trying to complete the next issue of our magazine).
Luckily, yesterday was a Saturday, so I had the time I needed to deal with what I found when I opened up Blogger for the first time in ages. If it had been a weekday, I would have been in trouble. I would have gone to work thinking about everything I needed to do on Blogger instead of concentrating on my job (and right now, concentration is rather the most important weapon in my work arsenal, given that we are trying to complete the next issue of our magazine).
I returned to discover that Blogger had undergone several major changes. Thankfully, they were all to my liking. A cleaner, more efficient user interface and immediate access to site statistics were nice additions, and there are several others I won't mention. The actual editor for creating posts is now far more pliable, with more room given to write (I have never understood why so many WYSIWYG editors give you such a tiny box to write in that makes it possible to see only the barest portion of your post. The original Blogger editor only allowed me to see about a paragraph and a half. Frustrating...) But my favorite new item was the ability to build stand-alone pages that create tabs which you can display across the top of your homepage. Suddenly, your blog could get a little closer to looking like a real website!
This is something I had long wanted, and had spent a good amount of time a couple of years back trying to get a regular website up and running which would get me closer to my original vision of what I wanted to do. The problem was that I already had the Pylon going for several years at that point, and I became frustrated in trying to devise a way to merge both sites properly. I had so much material on the Pylon and on its then-current sister site, the Cinema 4 Cel Bloc, that I didn't see the point of transporting all of it to a new site. The logistics of such a move made my head swirl. And with time and money at a premium in my life, I gave up the proposition.
But now that I had pulled a Rip Van Winkle on blogging, and woke up several months later to find that the entire Blogger world had changed (but without seeing weird little men playing nine-pins or my having grown a massive white beard), I could consolidate my efforts into just improving The Cinema 4 Pylon.
And thus, you will discover that changes are at hand. After posting for the first time since mid-November (and I will not recount the reasons at this moment), I started messing around with the layout for the site. Because I ran into this just yesterday, I still haven't quite worked out exactly how things will look, but first I corrected the banner on my header (one small reason I gave up on the site for a while was that I could not locate my original art files, which I also found going into this weekend) and also resized the site. I began to build the stand-alone pages, but I have not quite put up (or created, in some cases) the material that will eventually go into these, so please be patient.
And now I will celebrate with a round of figurative nine-pins and the dancing of a sprightly jig (also figuratively, since my back will not allow it) for posting two days in a row. Hopefully, my interest is piqued enough to keep me going.
This is something I had long wanted, and had spent a good amount of time a couple of years back trying to get a regular website up and running which would get me closer to my original vision of what I wanted to do. The problem was that I already had the Pylon going for several years at that point, and I became frustrated in trying to devise a way to merge both sites properly. I had so much material on the Pylon and on its then-current sister site, the Cinema 4 Cel Bloc, that I didn't see the point of transporting all of it to a new site. The logistics of such a move made my head swirl. And with time and money at a premium in my life, I gave up the proposition.
But now that I had pulled a Rip Van Winkle on blogging, and woke up several months later to find that the entire Blogger world had changed (but without seeing weird little men playing nine-pins or my having grown a massive white beard), I could consolidate my efforts into just improving The Cinema 4 Pylon.
And thus, you will discover that changes are at hand. After posting for the first time since mid-November (and I will not recount the reasons at this moment), I started messing around with the layout for the site. Because I ran into this just yesterday, I still haven't quite worked out exactly how things will look, but first I corrected the banner on my header (one small reason I gave up on the site for a while was that I could not locate my original art files, which I also found going into this weekend) and also resized the site. I began to build the stand-alone pages, but I have not quite put up (or created, in some cases) the material that will eventually go into these, so please be patient.
And now I will celebrate with a round of figurative nine-pins and the dancing of a sprightly jig (also figuratively, since my back will not allow it) for posting two days in a row. Hopefully, my interest is piqued enough to keep me going.
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