About…

Hi.

Andy Ihnatko here. No, I don’t know how to pronounce it either.

I’ve been a paid, published tech pundit since I was a teenager. These days, you can read me every week in The Chicago Sun-Times, once a month in Macworld, and also about once a month on the CBS Early show. I do a whole mess of regular podcasts, and my tech books tend to sell well enough to inspire my publishers to send me the occasional celebratory basket of artisan cheeses. Which is pretty swell because I like artisan cheeses.

But let’s not talk about me. Let’s talk about this site.

You know what they say about the best barber in town having the worst haircut?

No?

Oh.

Well, it was a logic puzzle in this book I had as a kid. They set up this specific case of a town where there were two barbers and apparently no home haircutting kits and no way to ever possibly get in or out of town. But somehow you get in, and of course the first thing you want to do when you’re imprisoned there for life is get a haircut, and pick one of the two barbers. Logically, you’re supposed to avoid the one with the perfect haircut because logically, he would have had to have gone to the other barber.

(Unless he was so talented that he just cut his own hair, which is very possible.)

(This is why I tend to be the most annoying person at playing logic games. “There could be any number of reasons why the doctor might say ‘I can’t operate on this boy; he’s my son’!” I’d angrily insist. “Maybe the doctor has another child who needs a heart transplant, and the doctor likes that kid more!”)

I seem to have lost the thread of this. I think the point I was going for was that this is by no means the most advanced and sophisticated and Web 2.0-ey Ruby-On-Rails-travaganza site on the Internet, but that this by no means should indicate that I am not a fully qualified and board-certified technology pundit.

Indeed, my skilz are truly mad; this has been noted and commented upon by many independent agencies. I’ve been blogging since 1995, before there were blogging tools and services. Before “blogging” was a word even. Computers were made from twigs and dried animal skins, and they ran on corn and if you “published autoheliographicoally on the etherweb” as we called it back then, you either bashed HTML code manually or (as I did) you wrote your own blogging software.

“CWOBber” eventually grew to be a fairly sophisticated client-side blogging tool. Any time I needed a new feature, I wrote it in myself…whether it was something as simple as turning a selected phrase into a Wikipedia link or as complicated as wiring up the entire blog with RSS feeds.

I was pretty damned proud of CWOBber. As a tech pundit, it’s important to eat your own dog food from time to time, and there was no better way to understand every new WWW standard and architecture than to have to figure out how to support it in your software.

That said, I was starting to acquire that lonely pallor of someone who long ago stopped being proud to own the only completely Green and self-powering house in the state. There was still a bit of pride but all of the original arrogance had been swept away and replaced by looking out at the neighbors through your smeary recycled-glass window and noting that a 60″ plasma TV showing all five seasons of “The Shield” in HD was way more entertaining than a homemade Cribbage board illuminated by a candle made from fat reclaimed from soapy dishwater.

I made up a list of all the features I wanted to add to my blog — all of the features that I envied from other people’s sites — and then I spent a little time figuring out how to pull it all off in AppleScript. The amount of labor required was inversely proportional to the sanity of the undertaking…it was readily apparent that it was about on the same level as moving the Great Pyramid at Giza four feet to the left. I could either write my own version of WordPress in AppleScript…or, well, I could just switch to WordPress.

And so, the great exodus to WordPress began. I had actually intended to wire up all of the infrastructure before going “live.” A fully-realized site map! A new, custom-made theme! All kinds of cool and ginchy interactive interfaces!

But a funny thing happened after I installed WordPress:

I started blogging with the damned thing.

WordPress achieved everything that I hoped it would. It was easy to set up and once I got it going, it got out of my way. Truly, by the end of the first week, I was just writing and posting stuff and not really thinking about things that needed to be fixed or improved. When I wanted a certain feature in the sidebar or elsewhere, I’d sigh and settle in for a long evening of PHP scripting, but usually found what I needed right in WordPress’ plugin and widget libraries.

And while I do still want to come up with a custom theme, it turns out that modding someone else’s is a very satisfactory quick fix.

The point is that WordPress is awesome software. I experimented with a bunch of other content management systems and it was like building a sewage treatment plant. A hell of a lot of planning and construction needed to be complete before you threw the switch, and if you didn’t do things perfectly, things could get awfully messy.

I have a lot of respect for Drupal, for instance. But somewhere on Day Three of my quest to compose a blog post that included a picture of some sort, I realized that you only get extra points for Degree of Difficulty in Olympic diving, and that perhaps this wasn’t the right system for my needs.

No, with WordPress you can simply grow a website organically. In five minutes, you can be blogging. At the end of your first day, you’ve got some additional creature-comforts installed. At the end of the first week, it’s really starting to look like “your” blog. You just keep adding features and enhancements as you deem them necessary…but the important thing, the only important thing, is that all the while, you’re blogging, blogging, blogging.

So all of this is my way of saying that Things Will Change as time vectors across the X axis. I’ll have me a mess of dropdown menus. A third column? Can-do. Headers that change based on the article category? Sounds delicious.

In the meantime, I’m pleased to follow the fine example of Google and Flickr and loads more Web 2.0 services and simply slap a “BETA” sticker on the thing.