First off, many thanks. Then my apologies for not responding lately. Life has been ridiculously hectic.

My dear friend Daisy assures me it’s an ebb and flow kind of thing, and I’m hopeful more time to blog will be flowing my way soon.

In addition, I have a sizable and growing backlog of things to write about, so one or two of those first, and then on to your comments….

I started this blog for a rather peculiar set of reasons. They aren’t worth belaboring, except to mention the sense of adventure it gives me. The reality of blogging seems to me quite different from most people’s preconceptions, including my own.

It’s hard to explain, but somehow it makes me feel more alive. It reminds me of when I took a photography class.  All of a sudden I really saw things around me — in a way I never had before. And so it is with blogging. Somehow I engage a bit more fully than I otherwise would.

There’s one ground rule, though. That’s that I have to let go of perfectionism. It’s quite an exercise for me. I have to remind myself of it repeatedly while keyboarding. But I know that if I start laying my perfectionist standards on this blog, it will grind to a halt. I simply don’t have time. And I know this is all very good for me.

Good enough is a glorious thing.

I toyed with the idea of using Drupal for this blog, but then I came to my senses. At this point I’ve developed over a dozen not just blogs, but WordPress blogs, plus my host, Dreamhost, makes the inevitable periodic upgrades a cinch. It’s just point and click.

Choosing a theme, however, was less obvious. In the end, after a bit of window-shopping at sites like Smashing Magazine, I went with adapting the very handsome CopyBlogger theme. It wasn’t so much the looks (though I do like the clean lines) as the way it renders the code. It has a good reputation for semantic markup and search engine optimization. See, for example, this review.

I’m still not quite satisfied with my adaptation, but it’s getting there. And it was very easy to do. My only suggestion for others wanting to use it would be to delete the separate call for “custom.css” (line 12 of header.php) and just edit the style.css. It’s there to protect the layout cross-browser, but it you’re used to CSS, you won’t need this, and deleting this second stylesheet saves both confusion and at least a little bit of bandwidth.

It sprang full-bodied from my head — kind of like Athena and Zeus, I suppose. Well, not exactly. Chances are Zeus had a dreadful headache afterwards, and I don’t — not to mention having to attend to all the pesky details like developing a blog look-and-feel. I gather Athena came fully garbed, and Zeus didn’t have to attend to such minor matters.

The truth is I have loved writing Faith and Web, but no longer have time to produce substantive articles. Moreover, I keep bumping into things I’m dieing to blog about, and there seems to be a bit of theme to these items. Whether they are about gadgets, fashion, community or whatever, they all make this web diva happy. Hence the name of the blog. Mostly they are things-web (e.g. right now I’m on a huge, wonderful Drupal tear), but I’d like to leave wiggle room for other things.

I hope you enjoy these snatches. I intend to.