The other day I said I was setting up this website to get ideas out of my head and make room for new ones. I guess that’s only part of it. The rest of it is to document in the hope that it’s useful or at least interesting to more than just me. I already do this with 
but I can’t put everything in there. Smaller, more discreet things can go here. I think this sits adjacent to my journal. This is the conversation I’m having with myself that results in and eventually into artworks (actually I consider one of my artworks). Anyway, there are things that I put in my journal that aren’t ready to be public and there are things that I can put here that never make it into my journal.
I think I first started blogging in 2002. I ditched that blog and started over in 2004 when I started video blogging. That lasted until maybe 2009. Somewhere between waning interest, reliance on unmaintained WordPress plugins, and the demise of Blip.tv (video hosting) I called it a day and wiped everything. I became fond of collecting domains and stared things in various places: greymattergravy.com (now hosting another zine I make), x627.com, talkbot.tv, verdi.space, verdi.mov, and zine.party. Meanwhile, I have at least a half-dozen YouTube accounts and various social media accounts that I start and delete. It’s too much and too confusing. And the thing is, I already have a great place for everything — michaelverdi.com (it’s my fucking name). Thank you other Michael Verdi who let the domain expire in 2003. So this weekend I’ve been putting it all together. There’s still lots I want to do but this is in a workable state.
In the time since I last used WordPress (the software behind this website) it’s changed a lot. It’s basically a drag and drop website builder now. Which is fine — nice even for most of what I’ve set up here. Thankfully, past me built the Blank WordPress Page template and put it on GitHub almost 10 years ago. It’s fucking cool and it still works like a charm so let me tell you about it.
So WordPress has themes that control what a site looks like along with some of its functionality. If you want to do something very custom, you can make your own theme from scratch but they’re very complicated and you’ll be duplicating a lot of the hard work that others have already done. But if you create a child theme (relatively easy) you get all the benefits of the parent theme while still being able to add special customizations that you couldn’t do otherwise. This is where the Blank WordPress Page template come in. It allows you to create a WordPress page and then use any HTML, CSS, and Javascript you want — just for that page. So for example, here I used it to create this cool, old-school splash page you get when you visit the site.
I also used it when bringing over verdi.mov and zine.party. It lets me have this blog and still make anything else I want. I very excited about this.