Tag: wordpress

Pardon The Dust

Every time I pick a WordPress theme, I tell myself that this time it’s going to be permanent. There’s no way this theme could ever look dated, I think. And then a few years go by and I realize time has moved on and the thing I thought was cool now looks outdated and lame.

So then I have to spend two hours tweaking settings and playing with previews until I find something that feels not lame. And all the while, a little voice whispers in my ear that it’s time to get out of the bush league and buy a professional theme for real money dollars because the lack of professional theme is the only thing that’s keeping me from realizing my dream of being an author. And then I start to think, you know, maybe that’s a good point; 80 or 100 bucks for a theme isn’t an extravagance, it’s an investment. In my FUTURE CAREER.

And then I see a perfectly good free theme that meets my needs and I go with that, because otherwise I have to justify to my wife (and to myself) why I spent 150 bucks on what basically amounts to a different usage of white space and a different font choice.

Yeah. Better stick to the free themes. When I find a good one, I play around with it until I’m happy and then I tell myself that this is the one, this look is timeless and will never, ever look lame.

So anyway, if you’ve been trying to read anything over the past few hours, that’s probably why things keep shifting. It’s not just you. Unless your graphics card is starting to fail, in which case it might be you.

Cynical Idealism Is One Year Old Today

I made my first post on this blog on March 13, 2013. I’d moved to WordPress after retiring Objects in the Mirror, my oft-neglected blogspot site that was begun as an undergrad writing assignment that continued on for a few years after I finished that class.

It’s been a very interesting first year. This blog has been the most successful thing I’ve ever done online. There have been some interesting and insightful comments made from both dedicated readers and brief visitors alike. In fact, although I wrote up a comment policy and posted it last summer, I haven’t had to deal with trolls outside of a brief influx of MRA activists back in June and July.

That’s the aspect of this blog that I’m the most proud of. Not the MRA activists, screw those guys. I’m proud that this site and these posts have been able to create a place for discussion, however small a corner it may be in the scheme of the larger web. I debated even allowing comments when I first started. I looked at sites both large and small and saw the spam, the trolls, the general toxicity and I asked myself if it was even worth it.

Over the past year, my readers have shown me that it has been worth it unequivocally. I’ve learned more from the responses to my posts than I ever thought possible.

So rather than take this moment to look back and talk about all the things I did, I’d like to say thank you for everything that you did. I started this blog assuming that I was talking to myself. You’ve shown me that this wasn’t true and for that, I am deeply appreciative and grateful. I look forward to the second year of Cynical Idealism’s life and all the things that I’m sure to learn through your comments and discussions.

Thank you for reading.

Weirdest Of The Weird: Adventures In Search Engine Terms

One of the neat features that WordPress offers is its ability to track what search terms are leading people to your blog. Ideally, this information will show you which of your topics are generating more traffic and allow you to tailor your content to your audience. That’s pretty interesting.

Even more interesting, however, is seeing what sorts of freaky shit people are entering in their Google searches that are resolving to my blog. Some of it makes sense to me. My post about Tauriel, for example, generated a lot of variations of the phrase “who the hell is Tauriel?”

A lot of these results, however, just have me tilting my head to one side like a dog with an expression of “how the fuck, I don’t even.” Here are some of the (weirdest) highlights. This list is rather NSFW, which should be obvious based on the subject matter:

  • draenei male fucks night elf female
  • lara croft 2013 hot
  • primal zergling
  • sylvia browne sucks
  • what to do if black mamba bites u
  • i think god is trying to tell me we are meant to be
  • principal skinner gun cock
  • aging liberals have more sex
  • changing legs on mamba
  • captain kirk hates communism
  • catholics are cynical
  • cynical people are smart
  • scrotum length happiness
  • fighting in skin tight clothes
  • i am ready for reporting tomorrow
  • harry potter aayla secura fanfiction
  • necrophilia snakes
  • animals boning

I have to imagine there are some incredibly disappointed necrophiliacs and zoophiliacs out there who arrived at my blog and cursed my name after realizing they’d be led astray. For the record, my personal favorite is “captain kirk hates communism,” if only because,I absolutely cannot figure out how that phrase connects to anything I’ve written.

Stay weird, Internet. Seriously, don’t ever change.