Very Highbrow Gets a (Free, Low-Maintenance) Blog Make-Over

Hey guys, the blog is back! And better-looking.

At least I think so. This laborious effort to move from Blogger to WordPress started back in April, mostly because it seemed all the serious bloggers were like, “We use WordPress! Blogger is for the birds!”

So I jumped on the self-hosted WordPress bandwagon, paid for server space and…got completely mired in the minutiae of blog customization. It took forever to change simple things like photo borders and fonts, mostly because all the forums seemed to be written by people with advanced degrees in Computer Science. If you have an advanced degree in CS and think I am exaggerating, remember: it’s all relative; I majored in English and then More Freakin’ Anglaise (teehee) and was never even once exposed to Excel, never mind HTML.

Tom kindly offered to help, but being very thorough, he was also very slow. There were times when I just wanted him out of the way so I could post something, except on customizable WordPress the photos never looked LIKE I IMAGINED IT IN MY HEAD. I always had to wade through all this rot: endless threads written by kind-hearted engineers advising me to “just go through the Style CSS” and “find this code: a;lskdjfa;lksdja;sldkfj; and replace it with xa;lkjsdlfkja;elkflkjx;lkgj .” What the hell is all that?

It really got in the way of my productivity and made me feel like I was trying to turn the Book of Kells into a comic strip, when really all I wanted to do was turn a comic strip into a comic strip.

And then Tom and I found an apartment, moved, and started new jobs all in the span of one month. The blog revamp was set aside and I continued writing on Blogger, all the while paying for server space I wasn’t using. When I could, I spent hours I could have used to write trying to decipher and understand all this code. 

There are only so many hours in a day.

Tom called me a quitter for not wanting to work through my self-hosted WordPress issues, but I’m at an age where I must play to my strengths. This became even more apparent when I got fired. Suddenly, I had plenty of time to work on my blog but instead of writing, I sunk deeper into cyberspace muck: in blog limbo between the aging but easy-to-use Blogger and the youthful, full-of-promise, but for me, cumbersome self-hosted WordPress.

“There has to be an easier way.” I thought.

So I did what I do well. I cancelled everything and started over. Mainly, I nixed my self-hosted WordPress and started anew on WordPress-hosted WordPress. If that sounds confusing, it was. I’m still not sure what happened but Tom told me everything was going to be okay. Then I redirected my vanity domain and closed down veryhighbrow.blogspot.com. 5 years, I blogged there. Thanks Blogger. (Moment of silence).

So now I’m here: on WordPress for the masses, using a free, easy-to-read theme (aptly called “Libre”) and ready to start posting more regularly. It’s also easier for people to comment directly on the blog. Best of all, I no longer have to worry about photos having a border or about any other choices that Self-Hosted WordPress forces you to make. Sometimes freedom means not having to make a gazillion small decisions that take (me) hours to execute.

If for some reason this blog becomes the blog to end all blogs and I end up needing more storage space and/or a more elaborate redesign…. well, I’ll figure it out when I get there. But for now, I’m getting back to what I’m good at. I hope you like what you see.