Back when I hosted my own blog, I wanted every feature under the sun and I wanted it YESTERDAY. Movable Type plugins were the best thing since sliced bread. Custom field for moods? Lay it on me! Hack to incorporate clickable smilies? I’ll do it! I was particularly impressed with myself when I managed to correctly follow a tutorial that involved altering some SQL tables in order to get a hit count per post.
Now I don’t even use the mood field on my LiveJournal, and it’s a custom moodset I made for myself of Starfire from Teen Titans. And when I come across tutorials that require more than copying and pasting code, I go “meh” and surf on.
It’s kind of funny, how I’ve come full circle-I taught myself HTML because I couldn’t stand any of the page builders or WYSIWYG editors, and now that I know how to code my own pages I love the AJAX sidebar widgets in WP.com because it means I don’t have to code things myself.
MySpace is still the devil, though. Embedding music in a page is the fastest way for anyone to lose my respect.
Vi (rhymes with "pie", not "tree") is a 26 year old mother of two who enjoys Cherry Coke, anime and homemade mac & cheese. She is especially fond of anything that comes in purple and people who use border="0" in their linked image tags.
heh, reminds me of my kid bro, who started out wanting to cook everything for himself – and once he learnt it, he wouldnt even hit the kitchen!
I moved to my self-hosted blog for greater flexibility. I’m still a novice but I’m picking up a little more now. I’m on the hunt for plugins and themes..
I just made the decition of host my personal blog myself – again – as I felt that a) using someone else’s theme didn’t feel much like me, even if I wish I could make just as great graphics as becca and b) as Joy said, having the flexibility to set up thing just as I want them. More freedom, but then again more responsibility..
“Embedding music in a page is the fastest way for anyone to lose my respect.”
I absolutely agree with this sentiment. It’s a rare occasion that I don’t have music or a radio station loaded on my machine — and we all know how cringingly awful listening to 2 sets of mismatched music in one room is. Even if I’m interested in the content of the page, I simply shut down the site at fault unless I immediately see a “mute” option… and if that isn’t in a prominent place or if it doesn’t exist… count me out as a visitor. There are plenty of other sites out there for me to read.
The thing that gets me is when someone at Myspace has a song and three videos that start at the same time. ARGH!
I will admit I am guilty of having a friend’s song on my myspace, and for that, I apologize.