An introduction, and a bit on WordPress

Well, hello there. I’m Bryce, and this is the first post on the blog section of my website. Powered by WordPress, as you can see. Initially, I was only interested in WordPress because the sheer number of job posts calling for it had me convinced that, despite my prior misgivings that it’s for people who can’t be bothered with “real” web development, there must be some merit to its use. For now, I’m still feeling my way around, experimenting, and figuring out how to get the best use out of the framework.

Speaking of use, it’s been an entire paragraph and I still haven’t explained what the actual use of this blog is. So, since it was started in the first place as an exploration of WordPress itself, I figure it’d be a good place to share my experience with new software, frameworks, coding languages, and technology. Or old ones, if they come up. While I’m inflicting scope creep on my own blog, with my education and personal fascination with user experience and the intersection of technology, culture, and society won’t let me keep quiet on such topics. People who are experienced in one field rarely pay much heed to the other, and typically view the other side as policing, authoritarian, visionless naysayers in the case of the former, or profiteering mad scientists paying no regard to the disruption they’re introducing to the global ecosystem in the case of the latter. While I’ve seen some cases where both are true, my goal is to bring a critical eye on both sides of these issues and maybe, just maybe, help with bringing about understanding as we inevitably march forward.

On the topic of moving forward, I suppose I should address the fact that I’m starting a blog in 2021, when, by my estimation, blogs stopped being cool over a decade ago, when people got more into stating their personal thoughts out loud to a webcam pointed at their chins on youtube, or crunching their thoughts into bite sized tweets. Or, to put it another way, content sharing moved away from a vast network of websites to a select few dominant social media platforms. I won’t deny that the possibility of this endeavor being a futile, outdated project more suited to a bygone era, I still couldn’t let the idea go. While popular social media sites like the ones mentioned may have a huge userbase, the formatting and presentation of content on sites such as those are handled and controlled by the sites themselves. Much more importantly, discoverability on such platforms is strictly governed by algorithms that are designed to promote content that reflects the brand identity that the site’s staff are aiming for. While a blog of one’s own may be an undertaking that few truly saw through, places such as forums, message boards, and blogs being widely used to discuss an infinite number of topics mean that someone could, with enough effort, find a place to express themselves that suited them, and, in some cases, make it truly their own. MySpace may be a ghost town today, but it was an early pioneer in social media that gave users full HTML editing capabilities on their pages. While this may have exposed fellow MySpace users to some cases of truly horrific web design, it gave users the opportunity to make a page where they were meant to express themselves in the first place more unique to them. Meanwhile, up to date and trendy social media pages are engineered to be a part of a site’s overall brand, with differences only found in the context of posts themselves. On the one hand, this, naturally, results in a more coherent and consistent experience for end users. On the other, it renders that content less distinct, and leaves the producers off that content with a diminished identity in the eyes of those who are consuming it if they aren’t already paying close attention.

And close attention is a tough thing to earn, especially among millions of other content creators competing for it.

With all that being said, aside from learning more about WordPress (and maybe other web frameworks), this blog is here to carve out a piece of the internet that is all my own.

As for WordPress, now that it’s functional, it certainly seems like a convenient tool so far, but the much touted “5 minute install” most definitely did not go smoothly on my free, behind the curve, questionably capable web host. When I attempted to FTP the zipped folder to my web server, it would fail to extract correctly, forcing me to manually comb through WordPress’ esoteric and convoluted file structure and trace the errors it was throwing to identify just what files needed fixing.

If nothing else, the experience served as a crash course in WordPress troubleshooting.

I suppose this first post has gone on quite long enough, so, I’ll wrap up with what media I’m consuming these days, as is the tradition in old school blogs.

Reading: Masters of Doom – David Kushner

Watching: Chernobyl – HBO

Listening: Solitude – Candlemass

Playing: Fate Grand Order