Little by little, I’m making progress on a new design for the Zuiker Chronicles. It will use the new brand by Ning but won’t look that much different than the current site: simple that is, with just my blog and its archives.
I’ve spent many hours over the last year comparing CSS offerings—Pico, Bulma, and others listed at State of CSS — but I’ve decided to use Mustard. Mustard is more than 10 years old at this point, and one that I contemplated using when I last designed the site (I’d really like to use the Stepper feature); it’s missing some of the features of more recent systems, like the light-dark theme switching. But I tell myself to just get this project done, and perhaps update to another CSS system later this year. There are easier ways of doing this, I know: just install a theme, replace the logo, and get to the writing. Part of the project, though, is to challenge my brain with the exercise of coding in CSS, HTML, and Textpattern.
I took a break last week to update my personal bio page at antonzuiker.com. That side project was faster because I used the elegant Tufte CSS. Updating my bio meant looking back on my service, my career, my education, even staring at the highs and lows of BlogTogether and ScienceOnline and Talk Story and The Long Table, my various attempts (with others) to foster community and more. There’s so much more than I’ve put on that bio page. I nodded in agreement when I read what Om Malik recently wrote (about a terrible day in his life):
Today, however, I woke up pretty early and somehow knew it was ten years later. The cosmos was reminding me of how far I had come.
On my bio page, I’m still using the sentence I wrote nearly 20 years ago: “I am a writer because my grandfathers wrote to me.” Their regular newsletters—travel chronicles and daily journal entries—to me and the extended family inspired me to want to document my steps, my flights, my meals, these conversations with others, our moments of joy and fear and awe and wonder.
I created Zuiker Chronicles Online (25 years!) to honor my grandparents and uncles and aunts and father and mother. I already was a journalist and magazine editor, now coming home from an unplugged Peace Corps service in the South Pacific, when the Internet offered up a new platform for this family tradition, this urge to share what we write. Immediately we had a reason: Frank the Beachcomber, our patriarch, was gone, and the words of love tumbled out. In the first years of Zuiker Chronicles Online, I experimented with ways to connect the far-flung family; in graduate school, I analyzed how “personal publishing software fosters online family”.
By then I was blogging on my own, for myself. Publicly, yes, but really to keep myself writing, learning, and learning to write. In this 2010 post, I noted my formula: “The more I write, the more I think. The more I think, the more I understand. The more I understand, the more I express.”
Last week, Manton Reece wondered” about why he writes and just how far his own online writing reaches:
That’s okay. The act of writing itself helps us think, helps us learn, helps us discover how we feel about a topic. It’s creative and has value even if no one is reading. It’s a snapshot in time to look back on later.
Dave Winer, always digging, is building WordLand, a writing tool that hooks into Wordpress. I’ve used most of Dave’s previous writing tools but I’m passing on WordLand since Textpattern is still my CMS and MarsEdit my main writing interface. I respect that Dave continues to advocate for a modern writing experience; he asks that we “write a blog post that explains why you believe in The Writer’s Web” and that, in part, is the reason for this post.
After all these years, the writer’s web I want is the one right here at my fingertips: a keyboard, a connection, a server, a site, and a page on which to “leave a record of my activities and losses and joys and interactions, a trace of my existence that will connect me to my loved ones here and now and in the future” (from this 2019 post).
© Anton Zuiker