About This Site

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

This site is run using Word­Press, a mar­velous open-source blog­ging plat­form that func­tions very nice­ly as a con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem. I use var­i­ous plu­g­ins to extend and cus­tomize WP.

Wow. It’s incred­i­ble how much sim­pler this bit is than when I start­ed this site in 1995! I ini­tial­ly 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 changed from time to time as I dis­cov­er new toys or grow tired of old ones. I’ll always be a child at heart, sub­ject to bursts of enthu­si­asm and a ten­den­cy to want to share the lat­est delights I’ve found with every­one. Hav­ing a web­site is a less-annoy­ing way to do that than to be con­stant­ly email­ing all my acquain­tances with URLs and such!

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 try to be some­what con­scious of stan­dards. I’m still work­ing on ensur­ing acces­si­bil­i­ty through­out the site when using Word­Press, as the code does­n’t always val­i­date prop­er­ly, even when it looks just fine.

At one time, there was a list of web pub­lish­ing resources here, with some notes about learn­ing to cre­ate web­sites. That stuff was too out­dat­ed to be help­ful, and it’s been quite a while since I’ve need­ed to refer some­one to them or had any­one men­tion using them.

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 fan­tas­tic 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. I whole­heart­ed­ly rec­om­mend him if you need any sort of web-relat­ed pro­gram­ming or training.

Site Name

I have been Tech­noMom since 1995 when I was the first woman hired for a tech­ni­cal job at Mind­Spring Enter­pris­es, and that was the title my super­vi­sor placed on my busi­ness cards.

A for­mer SO called me the Ene­my of Entropy because I tend to orga­nize the crap out of any­thing I take over.

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 pol­i­tics. On the oth­er hand, peo­ple usu­al­ly learn that I’ll tell them the truth, peri­od, regard­less of whether I like or agree with them. The best boss I ever worked for asked me the most chal­leng­ing ques­tions because he knew I’d always give him a straight, even 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.

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

One thought on “About This Site

  1. 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

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