It’s one of the great mysteries in my life that I don’t find some things earlier.
Like settings on the website control panel that allows me to easily create spiffy, easy-to-find subdomains. If that sentence sounded like Greek or some other similarly foreign language, then hang on. The translation is coming.
First, some background to give you a feel to what goes on behind the curtain here at the site. Believe it or not, we’ve owned the domain name lathropworld.com since January 2007, which means we’ve entered our seventh year of hosting our sad excuse for a website here.
But for the most part during that time, most of what I’ve put here has just been a blog, which is akin to buying a huge house and just living in the bathroom. So as I’ve been looking for hobby and entertainment opportunities, I’ve decided that I really need to do something to be more active online–more Instagram photos, more Tumblr posts, more Tweets, Facebook Pokes, or whatever…
So over the coming month or months, I’ll be gradually be filling the other rooms of this house like a hoarder collecting old National Geographics. In the process, the whole joint is getting a facelift and a new paint job, probably in fits, starts, and nonsensical, problematic efforts. There are things I’m going to try that I’ve never done before, programming and technical things that I need to test live on the site, and configuration changes on the back-end that are almost guaranteed to screw something up because I’ll have missed reading step 87b in the 900 point instructions.
As an example, take the main page to the site. What, you say? This place had a main page? Yep. Go to lathropworld.com. I redesigned that over 3 days, and I’m not entirely sure I’m happy with it yet…I’m proud of the post card, but not entirely happy with the whole presentation yet. And you’ll notice right now that there is exactly one link on the page. Yep. That’s the bathroom. It’s upstairs and to the right.
So what does this mean to you, the seeker of all things Lathropworld-y? First and foremost, it means that I’ll be trying to have more fun around here, posting more stuff I find online, more pictures, more things that I feel like sharing with everyone.
But it also means that you’ll probably see some errors around here, or things that look stranger than usual. It means that there will be links to new areas of the site, and these may not actually be hosted here–to use the house analogy, it’ll be like having a spare bedroom that actually is in a house across town, but you still get there by stepping through the door off the upstairs landing.
It means that I’ll be working on a consistent look and feel to the entire site, and that if I don’t post on one page, that doesn’t mean I didn’t post today–there may be some other new things on other pages.
It’s a complicated plan. A complicated plan that isn’t fully fleshed out yet. Or fully planned, because I’m still discovering some of the things that I can do and I’m still learning how to do some of them–like using a custom domain name to get to one of my now 3 Tumblr pages…
And why am I doing all of this, you may ask? Well, this is what made it feel right as a hobby or diversion: because I have all of the tools to do it and want to give it a try. If it proves too much to do or something that I can’t make work right, then I’ll scrap it and do something else.
So pay attention: you’ll gradually see things changing around you every time you come here, and I’ll try to do my best to let you know what’s changing as it happens. And feel free to wander around and walk through the doors of the site as I open them. At the very least, I’m hoping it will be entertaining for everyone.
See you tomorrow.