Blogging is a bad idea; it may even be sadistic or narcissistic.

I’ll produce content on varying topics, probably in infrequent and sporadic bursts, for a non-specific audience of digital stalkers, lurkers, and passers-by. I have no doubt that I’ll share a few tidbits that some people will find interesting or useful, but I have no delusions about the fact that most of it will be drivel not worth the infinitesimal increase in costs resulting from processing, storing, indexing, and occasionally delivering to a misguided soul that expected something more. At some point, I will plant my foot in my mouth, demonstrate my complete lack of knowledge on some topic, and offend somebody I’m related to, work with, or live with; possibly all at once.

And, this is the digital world – everything will be backed-up, download, and/or cached. I’ll put it out there, and there it will stay. It will embarrass family and friends, anger co-workers, and negatively impact future job prospects. But, as a solid demonstration of reckless behavior, I’m going to do it anyway.

A few years back, I would have taken this opportunity to demonstrate my “superior technical prowess” by building a blogging engine from scratch. I would have designed and implemented everything, from the database scheme to the favicon. These days, I’m too lazy, and I have better things to do. So instead of impressing you with my nerd skills, I’ll impress you with my mature decision making and prioritization skills. I’ll use an existing blogging engine: WordPress. I picked this service because: it exists; I can use my own domain; it’s free; and it seems reasonable flexible (should I care to wield my dork skills at a later date).

While I have some ideas for posts, one of the first orders of business is cleaning up the design. I have a reasonably good idea of what I want things to look like, but I don’t have the patience or necessary skills to get it done. Sadly, most of my web-design experience is pre-CSS, and I have too much pride to hack at PHP for more than five minutes. The obvious solution is to give a handful of dirty nickels to an acquaintance to do it for me. Prepare to be impressed by my subtle use of light grays and long words that require Google to spell-check.