Tag: Blogging

a new look for janaremy

Perhaps some of you have already noticed that I’ve been doing a bit of rearranging around here. As of a month ago, my site looked like the image above.

I loved this look for my site that I’ve had for the past seven years. The colors and simplicity of the design were so me. However under the hood the site was a pretty big mess–the design wasn’t responsive, the subpage links kept breaking, and the content was really hard to update due to the customization of WordPress necessary to support the visual layout. So I realized that it was time for it to go and to adopt a new look.

So I fussed around about it for awhile and came up with something super-simple, that resembles some of the former look of the “pilgrimsteps” blog from way back when.

Today:

Way Back When:

And from Way Way Back When:

And From the Stone Ages of Blogland:

Some things never change, such as my love for light backgrounds, san-serif fonts, and images. But some things have changed so very very much in the past fifteen years. More than I can even begin to document. Fortunately I have a blog archive stretching back over all that time that I can peruse and marvel at all the roads I’ve traveled since then.

December 9, 2017
legacy bio, or what happens when you log in to blogger.com after more than 10 years…

Recently I logged into blogger.com while I was teaching a workshop, and when I did so my legacy bio from 2005 popped up onto the screen in front of the audience. It was a bit embarrassing to see my just-barely-in-grad-school self on that big screen and to realize just how much time has passed in the interim. I don’t live with any of those people anymore (I’m over 6 years divorced from John and the kiddos both live in their own apartments in different cities from me) and I’ve long since finished my Ph.D. While I still enjoy my afternoon cuppa and I do spend a lot of my discretionary time gardening, I rarely define myself by those hobbies. Of course I am still a cancer survivor and I am still am amputee, but I would probably not advertise those aspects of myself in front of an audience while I was speaking on a professional topic.

This is a pretty good example of how the internet doesn’t forget much, despite the fact that I’ve rather strategically moved my URLs around enough that my decades-ago blogwriting is not so easily discoverable. It still happens often that near-strangers will mention to me that “they’ve been reading my blog…” and I am left feeling like I’ve just left my junior high school diary open on a park bench.

So perhaps this is the perfect segue to an announcement about the talk that I’ll be giving at my alma mater on March 1st. It will be an opportunity to reminisce a bit about my life as a blogger along with my colleague Jeff Wasserstrom. If you’re interested in hearing some of my stories (including, perhaps, how it felt to have my decades-old blogger bio pop up in my workshop last week), please consider yourself invited to join in!

(And it is not without a large feeling of fondness that I note the location of this event is one of my former favorite UCI study haunts, which is now named after my best-ever UCI Bio prof).

February 7, 2017
Blogging Nostalgia

Am I the only one who misses that era of about 2008ish where everyone had a blog and part of the day’s ritual was to read all of your friends’ recent posts? Every once in awhile I peruse the lists of sites from my now-defunct RSS Reader and I can recall the thrill of having so many writerly friends that I heard from nearly every day. But mostly I miss the thrill and energy of regularly writing for an audience–my writing muscles have become pretty flaccid these past few years.

This quotation, from one of my most favorite articles about blogs, sums up the magic of the phenomenon so well:

Finally, I think I get the superhero fixation. It’s the flying. It’s the suspension of punctuation and good manners and even identity. Bloggers at their computers are Supermen in flight. They break the rules. They go into their virtual phone booths, put on their costumes, bring down their personal villains, and save the world. Anonymous or not, they inhabit that source of power and hope. Then they come back to their jobs, their dogs, and their lives, and it’s like, “Dude, the ball.”

Blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty. Whether bloggers tell the truth or really are who they claim to be is another matter, but WTF. They are what they write. And you can’t fake that. ?

(Note: the peonies have nothing to do with blogging, but they seemed worth including anyways…)

June 8, 2016