I haven’t felt like blogging recently, and if anything brings my blogging mojo back, it’s a new theme. So here it is. It’s based on WordPress’s default ‘Twenty Ten’ theme, although it doesn’t look like it, and I’ll probably tweaking it more over the next week or so. It’s a little more mature than my usual style, but still has some of that Jenni ‘edge’ to it. Surprisingly it didn’t take me anywhere near as long as some of my other themes; I can’t imagine ever doing proper professional design work because I’m far too much of a perfectionist. Sometimes I’ll spend a day or two working on a design and then scrap it completely. Case in point: my new portfolio site. I’ve re-done the layout for that three times already, and I’ve just decided to scrap it altogether in favour of a snazzy HTML5 and CSS3 layout.

Over the past couple of days I’ve been working on putting together blog posts on HTML5 and CSS3 for work, and some of the stuff out there is amazing. The web geek in me is excited and yet fondly remembering the old days at the same time – I guess ‘Look how far we’ve come!’ would sum it up nicely. 2011 is a landmark year for me, because it means that I’ve had domains now for a whole decade. I’ve been blogging, designing and accidental SEOing for a little longer than that. Part of me is sad, because I could have achieved more with my sites. Part of me is happy that I lived through such an era of landmarks.

As part of the research I did for another blog post, I found that although the term ‘weblog’ was coined in 1997, blogging didn’t really become a thing until 1999. So I jumped on the bandwagon pretty early. I had a manual blog for a bit which was just literally some text in a box on a page, and then I installed the (now-abandoned) GreyMatter blogging software. It took some crazy editing to even do the simplest thing, but I was a big fan of GreyMatter. I didn’t really go for the whole hosted blog thing, although I do have an LJ and a Tumblr. I think I’m just too much of a control freak ;-)

I’m reluctant to set any specific goals for my sites in 2011; I just want to take it slowly and see how things develop. As usual I’m being far too impatient about wanting everything to be done at once, and as usual I’m taking on far too much at once without actually finishing anything. But I do have a much more positive outlook, particularly for Blossom.nu, even though I have doubts about this blog and who may read it or want to read it. I don’t think I’m making it appeal to anyone specifically right now; I wrote about ‘making the transition’ a few entries back, and I’m still not there. It’s all about reworking the content, and I could carry on editing things forever, but I’m going to try and avoid doing that. Hopefully by the end of this year I’ll have a site I’m about 95% happy with :mrgreen: