My first post is destined to be a technology one, I guess. I’ve invested some time to get to know the state of the art on blogging tools, and find that like so many others I am smitten with WordPress. Fantastic tool. I have learned just enough CSS to be dangerous. Not that hard for me since I know PostScript, and CSS concepts are very similar. No doubt WordPress will go more towards a WYSIWG interface overtime, as I see folks are adding such features to their premium theme dashboards. I predict it will evolve into the next generation publishing program. Look out InDesign.
I also want to give a nod to Ian Stewart and his “Thematic” theme framework. Such a beautiful job of separating form from content. Almost thrilling to use after slogging through the creation of HTML sites in Dreamweaver. I easily built my old child theme called “Derivamatic” for this blog. I wanted a clean, minimal design that still reflects my color sensibility.
The state of web typography is still rather woeful. It makes me sad to not be able to use all the wonderful typefaces in my library. Access to type libraries seems to be the technology/legal gatekeeper. I know the folks at the W3C CSS committee are trying to work on this topic. I also found a fledgling effort called typeface.js but I haven’t had the bandwidth to play with it yet. I believe the folks at WordPress have a shot at solving the web typography problem, should they choose to work on the font licensing/embedding issue. Clearly they could perpetuate a core set of typefaces fairly easily via their platform. And that would be very nice. Remember the Postscript “core 35″?
Anyway, it’s been fun to play with this, and now that I have my own blog, I suppose I will have a good excuse for learning more.
