Some changes to TYWKIWDBI

This blog is now well into its second year of existence, so I thought it was time to do make some minor (cosmetic, not substantive) changes.

I've started with the title image above. When I set up TYWKIWDBI, much of my "target audience" (family, friends, neighbors) were newbies to the blogosphere, so I inserted brief instructions for navigating the blog. One year ago this week there was a day when the blog got three hits (me, my wife, my old friend Ted in Florida); now with about 2,000 visits a day by people who are much more "cybersophisticated," it seems appropriate to delete those directions.

I've also tweaked the acronym itself. TYWKIWDBI was a bit of a grammatical nightmare; I explained in the first post I wrote for the blog that as an English major in college I fully understood the discrepancy between the initial "Things" and the final "It," but it seemed necessary to render the acronym pronounceable. I have felt bad about it ever since, and have been called on it by at least one copyeditor blog. I obviously can't change the acronym itself, because that's how the blog is registered, but I can change the meaning of it; for the moment I've changed "It" to "Incessantly," which is suboptimal but a little less awkward than the original phrase (I'm open to any other suggestions).

The image in the header also needs to change. I selected the Icelandic waterfall because the layout faciliated the reading of the text, but the photo is not my own and is used without permission, so I'll be replacing it with a photo of my own later this year. And I'll need to revise the footer image which I created to help newbies navigate to page 2.

The rest of the layout could use some attention. As one blog put it "TYWKIWDBI is garish and offputting to anyone who judges sites on appearance alone..." At present I'm confined by the constraints of the Blogspot templates and my own lack of cyberskills, so further changes will come slowly.

More important than the format and appearance is the content. My goal for this second year is to incorporate more original material, or at least more material that is in keeping with the title acronym of providing content you won't find elsewhere. Anyone who blogs knows that creating new material is much more time-consuming than aggregating material from other sites, and this blog is already consuming more time than it should. I'll be making the transition, but will do so gradually.