About This Site

Posted by Cyn

(If you want to know more about the author, rather than the site itself, you want this other page.)

Most of this site is run using Word­Press, a mar­velous open-​​source blog­ging plat­form that func­tions very nicely as a con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem. The rest is being ported into WP as I find the time. I use a lot of dif­fer­ent plu­g­ins to extend and cus­tomize WP.

Wow. It’s amaz­ing how much sim­pler this bit is than when I started this site in 1995! I orig­i­nally cre­ated it so I could play — with HTML, with col­ors and pat­terns, and with words — and for a few other rea­sons, as well. It has always changed from time to time as I dis­cover new toys or grow tired of old ones. I’ll always be a child at heart1, sub­ject to bursts of enthu­si­asm and a ten­dency to want to share the the lat­est delights I’ve found with every­one, and hav­ing a web site is a less-​​annoying way to do that than to be con­stantly email­ing all my acquain­tances with URLs and such!

Best Viewed With Any Browser
The site has gone through var­i­ous trends in design, from plain old HTML to frames to tables to CSS and now a CMS. I’ve stayed away from the bleed­ing edge, but I do try to be some­what cog­nizant of stan­dards. I’m still work­ing on ensur­ing acces­si­bil­ity through­out the site when using WP, as the XML doesn’t always val­i­date neatly even when it looks just fine. It should dis­play prop­erly in any mod­ern browser, and I’ve used sev­eral to check the site. There’s even a spe­cial tem­plate that’s sup­posed to make the site usable for mobile browsers (cell phones and PDAs), although I’ve yet to actu­ally visit via such a thing to see how it works. Since I cer­tainly don’t use every browser there is I can’t promise that I’ve suc­ceeded, and will have to rely on any­one who has a prob­lem with the site to tell me (just leave me a com­ment, please).

At one time, there was a list of web pub­lish­ing resources here, with some notes about learn­ing to cre­ate web sites. That stuff is just too out­dated for belief, and it’s been quite a while since I’ve either needed to refer some­one to them or had any­one men­tion using them. If they’re missed, I’ll con­sider updat­ing that stuff and putting it back. I fig­ure there are plenty of more knowl­edge­able peo­ple who are happy to tell you how to do web pub­lish­ing now, though.

Host­ing

Sam and I eval­u­ated many dif­fer­ent host­ing com­pa­nies a few years back, and set­tled on 1&1. They’ve been extremely reli­able, and we’re def­i­nitely sat­is­fied. We rec­om­mend them with­out hesitation.

Thanks

For many years, Jay Finch was kind enough to host this and the other sites our fam­ily has cre­ated. We will always be grate­ful to him.

Jim Esten of Web­Dy­namic did a won­der­ful job of writ­ing some CGI scripts used on an ear­lier ver­sion of the site, and hold­ing my hand through learn­ing enough vocab­u­lary to know how to ask for what I needed. (If they don’t work, that’s my fault – after he turned the scripts over to me I started play­ing with them to learn more!) I whole­heart­edly rec­om­mend him if you need any sort of web-​​related pro­gram­ming or training.

Site Name

Cyn­thia Armis­tead is the Enemy of Entropy. She has been Tech­noMom since 1995, when she was the first woman hired for a tech­ni­cal job at Mind­Spring Enter­prises and that was the title placed on her busi­ness cards.

What’s this thing about being perverse?

A few of the words my the­saurus (thank you, Houghton Mif­flin) sug­gests for “per­ver­sity” are bull­head­ed­ness, dogged­ness, hard­head­ed­ness, obsti­nacy, per­ti­na­cious­ness, per­ti­nac­ity, tenac­ity, wilfulness.

Yep, that’s me. I am, in fact, absolutely unmove­able when I know that I am right. It doesn’t mat­ter how many peo­ple dis­agree with me, how much it costs me, or how dif­fi­cult my life is as a result — I do not back down.

It isn’t that I’m not open to new infor­ma­tion or oth­ers’ input. But I will not hide the truth as I know it. As you might imag­ine, I don’t play office or school pol­i­tics. On the other hand, peo­ple usu­ally do learn that I’ll tell them the truth, period, whether I like or agree with them or not. The best boss I ever worked for asked me the hard­est ques­tions because he knew I’d always give him a totally straight, if unpop­u­lar, answer.

That’s per­ver­sity for you, folks. I’m per­verse, to a pur­pose. I was rad­i­cally hon­est long before Mr. Blan­ton set­tled on that title for his fran­chise. Some­how, my main Live­Jour­nal ended up being called Pur­pose­ful Per­ver­sity a few years back.

So — I’m Tech­noMom, the Enemy of Entropy, being Pur­pose­fully Per­verse on a screen in front of you.

Namaste,
Cyn

1 My par­ents didn’t exactly allow me to flour­ish dur­ing my chrono­log­i­cal child­hood, so I sup­pose one could say that this is my first real child­hood, in terms of explo­ration, cre­ativ­ity, and being encour­aged to play.

Permalink | May 7th, 2006

One Response to “About This Site”

  1. Robin Says:
    August 28th, 2008 at 10:48 am

    Dear Cyn­thia,
    Stum­bled across your blog on “fat­ness” and it was an inter­est­ing and well writ­ten read. Things have sure changed. I can recall when I was fat (yes, I broke down, con­formed and lost weight)in the early eight­ies the shops for larger sized women car­ried near shame­ful sound­ing names. One felt they should almost put a bag over their head to just walk in the door! Larger sized women were referred to as “Portly”. I remem­ber won­der­ing what the W behind the size stood for..I won­dered if it meant Wide..and when I was told wom­ans I won­dered what all the smaller sized women were in terms of gen­der? Actu­ally the choice to lose weight was not one of “con­form­ing” but my own…I sin­cerely enjoyed the jour­ney and I nei­ther adovo­cate that oth­ers do the same or try and push oth­ers to in that direc­tion. It was sim­ply some­thing I wanted to do for me.
    I did want to point out one lit­tle thing about your article…back dur­ing the time when Mar­i­lyn was alive cloth­ing was sized quite dif­fer­ently. Though I don’t think she would have ever been what is now our size 2 she was never what would equate our size 16 nor even close. Size 12 was a very SMALL and admirable size dur­ing the late 50’s and early 60’s…if you ever watched I Love Lucy you will rec­ol­lect Lucy long­ing to make it into the ideal size…size 12. I remem­ber the ladies all dream­ing of mak­ing it into a 12, diet­ing try­ing to get into that dream size 12..it was in mag­a­zines with the Diet Cola ads, all of the Diet Adver­tis­ments. (I am 51 so I have some recollection…and remem­ber my Mom finally mak­ing the dream size)
    Also for your consideration…sizes are indeed larger now than they were some 30 years ago. I cur­rently wear a size 4…I pos­sess some of my cloth­ing from high school and also do some shop­ping at vin­tage shops for older, designer cloth­ing from the late six­ties and sev­en­ties. Believe me..clothing from today is much more gen­er­ously sized than it was in the past. My size 6 blue jeans from high school are much smaller than my size 4 from today! Cloth­ing man­u­fac­tor­ers are crafty..they know women want to feel small so they have made pat­terns larger.
    I have been tak­ing a class for my Mas­ters on Women in West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion and am research­ing this for my cur­rently for my the­sis. Women are even cog­nizant that cer­tain design­ers like Liz Clai­borne rou­tinely cut about one size larger than actu­ally marked – yet they love the idea they can pur­chase that size smaller they so long for.
    Just thought I would share!
    In all kind­ness,
    Robin