Experimenting with Blogger

God knows I'm not very technically savvy. The level of knowledge I possess about how technology of any kind works and can be used is pretty pathetic, especially by comparison to so many of the people I spend time with. But one thing I've always been pretty proud of is I'm not half bad, when given a decent chunk of time, at messing around with a computer program until I figure out how to more or less use it and make it do what I want.

Today I was messing around with Blogger. I've been toying with the idea of keeping a freestanding blog in addition to this Livejournal, with content mostly the same but geared less toward people who know me personally and more toward the public at large, taking a more "article" approach for the format and not so much a diary. I would post mostly only my rants, musings, projects and the like, but not so much the stuff I did this past weekend. Since I've had a Blogger site that I've mostly used as a mirror of this LJ for use in cross-posting to Google Buzz (never did manage to get the LJ-cross-posting-to-Buzz to function) I thought it might be worth messing around with that to see if I could get it to look the way I wanted.

Basically I wanted to construct a widget that would let me divide my writing into broader categories of my interests-- larp, cooking, writing, theater, culture and criticism, that sort of thing --and have icons across the top of the page leading to posts on each particular subject. The closest I could manage in Blogger to that was to construct original HTML widgets that allowed me to link an image to a particular tag page on the journal in a left-side column. This is imperfect, as I wanted to cull only certain entries from within those tags and also combine certain other tags under new headings, which this doesn't allow. I suppose I could re-tag everything, but that would be labor-intensive and make these icons redundant with the tag system.

What I have right now I kind of like, but as I said I'm dissatisfied. The header image definitely needs tweaking, and as I said my categorizing is not quite what I want. I'll have to mess around with it more. And this is still just basically a mirror of my LJ. Perhaps I'll just reorganize everything and actually bother to re-tag if I make a more "general-audience" version of the blog. I know you can tag things and make those tags invisible in Blogger, which might eliminate the redundancy problem. For now I'm just experimenting with the setup, and seeing if I can use the conveniently already-existing Blogger technology to accomplish what I want.
 

I LOVE THE SUPERSIZERS AHHHHH!!!

There is a BBC series of specials called "The Supersizers Go..." where a British food critic and comedian spend a week eating the authentic cuisine of previous eras of history. They take all these interesting major periods, from Medieval to the Renaissance to the Restoration to the Regency and beyond, and have the hosts live the lives of people in those times, complete with costumes and historical activities and course after course of the food of the times. I find it utterly fascinating. As a lover of period stories, I feel one of the most immersive touches you can include is to have the details of daily life, and its so hard to find information on that kind of thing when most sources focus on great public events. And of course the cuisines of the past are particularly interesting to me. It looks like great fun, though I don't exactly have the strong stomach such an exercise would require. I love seeing what the tastes and cooking techniques of these other times are, as food and eating has had such a huge impact on human culture and ritual. It's also really cool to see how things evolved and grew into the way we cook and eat today. Of course, this focuses mainly on the British tradition, and I must say, it explains a lot about the way British cooking developed, particularly the ways that are not known in the world as haute cuisine. :-) It is not only interesting and informative but also incredibly clever and funny, so I suggest you check it out right away.