On shedding skin

This long, thin photograph on the left is a resized screen grab of my entire blog, from beginning to May 9th. That's approximately seventeen months of blogging right there, sixty-three posts in all. My blog may very well have been the only one-page blog in the blogosphere. I've always had the links to the monthly archives in the sidebar, but up until now, if you scrolled down, everything was right there, on the first page, all my posts in full. See how long it has become.

When I first viewed the entire photo on one single screen, it looked like a road, very straight and very narrow, not at all like how I have lived my life for the past thirty-one years. No life can ever be completely straight and narrow through and through. No person could ever not make mistakes, not change, not waver. This is partly why bloggers change blog skins -- and even blogs -- seasonally. They know they have changed; they know they have moved on.

I, on the other hand, save for adding more data to the sidebar, am still using the exact same template I signed up with. It's not that I have not moved on, it's just a matter of sticking with what feels comfortable. I have grown into this skin. Or rather, it's this skin that has grown into mine. I've liked it from the first time I saw it, I never felt the need for a custom skin, and the ones available out there look a little too fussy. Too many colors, too many fruits and shoes and caricatures of smiling young women, too many overedited photos of people posing, too much dark and brooding themes, too much Lucida Handwriting and Monotype Corsiva. I wanted a classic, a template that had an "agelessly-aged" look, something that would represent me all throughout no matter how much I myself would change during the course of the months and years. I wanted the skin to be constant, immutable; it is the changing contents of the blog that will make the template -- and the blog -- truly mine alone.

But then again, I decided that maybe I can make a bit of a concession. After all, it would be a nice way for me to prove to myself that I do have some html skills and I am thus not a complete technomoron. So I have made a tweak to my template. Although it is barely discernible at first glance, a teeny tiny step when compared to the immense changes always going on in the blog world, it is nevertheless a giant step for me. I have a new background. The old one looked like this:


This new one is actually quite nice, if I may say so myself. It's elegant and understated, dainty, a little more feminine than the old one, has a little bit more dimension, and is a little brocade-ish but not overwhelmingly so. It's just right.

Also, I have collapsed the older articles and am now showing only the most recent forty articles on the main page. This makes the page faster to load, I suppose. The old posts are always available in the archives links. Maybe, in time, I can bear to show just twenty, or perhaps even ten posts on the main page -- and I do admit the idea still scares me -- but for now, forty will do. And as for the rest of the elements, they will stay the same. The skin will not be shed; it has only gotten a new blouse.

Looking at the full blog screen grab again, it does not look so much like a straight and narrow road anymore. Now it looks more like a line that I have drawn, a mark that I have left as I walked along the blogosphere, like walking along a road and dragging a stick in the dirt to mark the path that I have taken. It's a line that I can cut now, now that I know that it exists, now that I know it has made its mark. That blog has had its time. Now it's time for this blog, the same one, but different.