Finally – I’ve landed!

Phew! I’m here. It’s here. The website, that is.

I more or less know what I’m doing with websites, but I wanted a specific look for this one, being the first one that represents me and not my (ex-) business, workplace or incognito blog. And I wanted something free and easy to update ;-). After several frustrating, time-wasting, disappointing attempts (did I mention frustrating?!) my Techy Husband told me his workmates were recommending Wordpress.org (that’s Techy, not Tetchy, he’s in I.T – although sometimes…*g*). I’ve had a blog on WordPress.com for a while, so this sounded like a good idea, particularly when  I realised I could download the .org version for free to my subdomain. Yay! I was off.

But then I couldn’t find a Theme I liked. I spent some time trying to adapt themes from WordPress and downloading Notepad Chaos 2 from the web – a beautiful design with my favourite colours and lots of writery-imagery – but it needed more knowledge and time than I had to make it work in WP admin(and judging by whinges on the net, I was in good company!).  Still, this time wasn’t wasted (grits teeth) as my knowledge of CSS went from non-existent to minuscule – hooray!

Finally I found the theme you see before you – the Notebook Theme in all its glory. You can download it here. If you do so, and want to get rid of the aggravating ‘home’ tab (that doesn’t lead to a page you can edit but instead to a ready-installed ‘about me’ page, so you have two links to the same page!) – drop me a line and I’ll tell you how to fix it.

There are still things I want to add, and ideas and posts that I’ll steal from my old blog, WriteousIndignation, but this will do for today.

Ex-Medway Townie that I am, one of the things I’ve found funniest about living in much-more-rural west Cambridgeshire is the newspaper headlines. You could pretty much guarantee that the big stories in our old papers were going to be stabbings, drug raids, child abuse…

It’s very different here (and don’t get me wrong – I’m not complaining).  The most amazing things make the front page! A close friend upped sticks at the same time as we did – in her case to Somerset, near the edge of Exmoor. We often swap what are, to us, hilariously wonderful, gentle headlines, by email or letter. One week, our local front page story was about the names given to some chicks born at a local zoo – ok, they were a rather rarer breed than a chicken, but still…

However, it was the Cambridge News that made me snort with laughter yesterday (the snorting will make me look bad, in a minute.) I didn’t get a chance to follow this story up, because I only glimpsed the headline before my daughter whisked it away for delivery to her waiting customers, and to be fair it wasn’t the front page headline. It was one of those ‘other important stories’ that they give you a taster of at the top – you know, the ones that are meant to make you desperate to carry on reading the insightful journalism within.

It read: “I found glass shards in my peanuts.”

I told  you it would make me look bad… 😉