DIY Librarian

librarian.net, one of my main inspirations for starting DIY Librarian, turned 7 yesterday. In celebrating her milestone, Jessamyn notes the homogenizing effect of using a CMS:

And then a weird thing happens… all my entries from September 2003 on are all in WordPress. I imported the Movable Type entries when I moved, and so there is an odd sameness to the rest of my posts, even though things have clearly happeend and I have remained your trusty correspondent through thick and thin. It’s not the same thing, browsing a month’s worth of entries from three years ago when they don’t look any different from today’s entries.

I resisted moving from a hand-coded blog to a CMS for many of the same reasons. When I first started DIY Librarian (then referred to in all lower case letters), I sometimes used different stylesheets for each month—a Halloween stylesheet for October, or a Valentine’s Day style for February. The old entries are still there, but when I did some redesigning I had to fix some of my hacked-out HTML code and just applied one stylesheet to the whole mess. Now that I am using WordPress, any style changes will automatically apply to the whole blog. The holiday-themed logos I designed are still there: Halloween DIY Librarian, Halloween DIY Librarian 2004, St. Patrick’s Day DIY Librarian, and my favorite, Valentine’s Day DIY Librarian. I was able to retrieve a few primitive iterations of DIY Librarian using the Wayback Machine: September 2003 (the stylesheet seems to be having some issues) and October 2004 (with the Halloween stylesheet and a photo of the pumpkin plant which my landlady subsequently “disappeared”—apparently the front stoop is not the appropriate place for pumpkin-farming, unbeknownst both to myself and to the previous tenant who dropped seeds there during while carving a pumpkin).

In the beginning, I was using the blog as much to practice my coding as to publish my writing. Now, I’m more concerned with the writing and learning how to tweak a CMS than I am with the coding.