Creativity


Nurturing my inner nature and serving the magick. Something I have neglected for far too long. And it looks pretty good too.

I know you won't see this until after I upload the new site design. Right now I am tweaking the new templates so I keep the same functionality as the old site while eliminating most of the dirty HTML code I used to get things working.

I still would have preferred to have the control bar on the left hand side, sort of an inside joke for my Pagan readers. But I think that having the links to the other two blogs is more important. I'm more than just my faith.

The new templates and style sheets incorporate many things I wanted to do before, but did not have the skills/tools to make work at the time. It's a lot more flexible, I can change the background on the pages or in the banner with just one entry instead of recoding each and every page. I intend to do that.

Working on the banners, experimenting with the code, it reminded me of something very important.

I groove on making things. Sensory things.

Let's take music. I'm a poor to fair musician, and I will probably never really be able to sit in on a jam session. I had a hard enough time in school band just playing along with the sheet music. I am an okay (if enthusiastic) singer. But let me mix my own sounds, and things really take off. I can tell you what fits and what doesn't. I can take a piss-poor recording and make it sound impressive. As a musician I am terrible, as a producer and sound man I am amazing.

Same thing goes for film and video. In college I was a film major (and it is a long complicated story how I ended up a Corporate Clone). I may not have been the best photographer, but I could picture how it was supposed to turn out and fit together. I was great at storyboarding. And I was amazing as an editor.

In high school I got corralled into a few last minute sessions on the newspaper and yearbook. Not because I had taken those classes, but because I had a reputation for making things look good on a page. This was preMacintosh, cut and paste was REALLY cut and paste.

As a Corporate Clone, I made my "official" reputation by creating and adapting training programs. Mix and match with a fair amount of original work, and I got results.

You shouldn't be surprised to know that the first magickal Gift I discovered was creating and controlling "critters." For me, making lesser elementals was pretty easy, even if I didn't understand the theory at such a young age. Not quite as natural as breathing, but probably as simple as a walk thorough a park.

And yep, I am pretty decent at ritual design. I mix and match, but I have a real flair for poetry and chants.

Web pages though, those I really enjoy. It's one of the simplest ways I know that can make a huge impact. Years ago when I started, all my coding was by hand. I got very good at modular HTML, and I would take a proven bit from one project and tweak so it would work in the next one.

Most of my web design and blog writing in the last two years has been for Pagan Vigil, my semi-mainstream freedom blog. That was great and challenging, but it's not as personally fulfilling. Because of the subject matter and the "more than just black and white" theme, I am pretty restricted on what I say and do there. I can't exactly talk about politics and then talk about the way that the sky at dawn called to something very primal to me.

And that brings us back to the redesign of this blog. I didn't know squat about working with CSS when I started the blogs. Using the (very limited) tools in iBlog, I tried to create a "feel" for what I wanted when I resurrected Technopagan Yearnings as a Pagan blog. I got an approximation, but there were limits.

The new version lets me do much more, like adding personal touches here and there. I can make things that reflect the seasons, I can customize looks for the esbats and the sabbats. I can share parts of myself. I can do it very easily just by changing a line or two in code, and the changes will show in the entire site.

I can create something for the magick instead of something for the politics.

Bit of a Yule present for me. And much more pleasant than most of the other Divine thumps to the head I have gotten.

Oh sure, there are still some tweaks. I haven't decided on which is going to be the final logo banner, and until I do I won't be "pruning" out the final white pixels on the corners. That has to be done manually, I am only going to do it on the final version. I haven't decided if I like the way the inner banner looks (I did it before I decided to use a picture background).

But I like the feeling I get when I make.

Posted: Mon - January 1, 2007 at 08:45 PM
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