Have been working with WordPress a lot lately, and as of today I found some nice features of the “visual” post editor: it’s possible to drag down the editing window to expand to a larger area, which for longer entries can be quite helpful.  There’s then the “full screen” mode which similarly gives a better space to re-read and edit and write.  All in all, the WordPress system is a rather great tool, both for managing and creating content.

I still look back to my old “blog,” titled RINTA, which was much more cut down.  I had one text box into which I wrote, and I primarily used Textile markup for any sort of code or media.  That did seem to work a bit better, in terms of entries such as this where I’m leaving crumbs rather than more structured and categorized essays, as I have here.

Indeed, I do find that the form and the system of software does have a rather large impact on the way that I am writing.  With RINTA, I had a few close friends who I knew followed my writings, and in terms of the general Internet I never did the things that Google or any other traffic generator liked all that much.  I imagine, to the aggregating and filtering software out there, my content was a bit too primitive and possibly tied more closely to spam or some other similarly unworthy drivel.

Since I switched to WordPress, my numbers with Google rather improved, and I’ve been able to get more traffic from other sources by a much greater degree.  The general framework that WordPress creates is something that the Internet likes.  It’s more familiar and packaged in a more common way.  Because of that, I’ve been checking my stats much more regularly, and, eventually, thinking about finding ways to make those numbers creep up, make my audience larger.  At the end of the day it’s sort of a silly enterprise, and on the other end I’ve been a bit more reserved and concerned with making more “premium” content.  I’ve been a bit less personal, looking towards these web-crawling spider “robots.”

I don’t know that I particularly have a plan, now, seeing the above trends.  In the end, though, I know what is important to me is being able to get back into the mind set of what I had with RINTA, where I didn’t care quite as much about the structure or the numbers.  A website should be something a bit more about a legacy, I think; something created, fairly common, yet standing for years on the wave of bits passing through all these Internet tubes.

And with all of that said, I do have to say that the word “blog” really has always sounded rather dirty to me, and I hate to use it.  I try “website” or “journal” or whatever else, even though at the end of the day it’s just a word for some content and, again, by any other name my words will sound just as sweet.