Your momma’s so skinny she has to run around in the shower just to get wet.

Why would I be remembering this particular joke from childhood? This story actually starts when we last moved. For the first few weeks I would never have enough hot water to take even a quick shower. Also the pipes squeal something terrible and the water pressure wasn’t the greatest. The hot water issue we were able to take care of: one of the elements in our hot water heater was out. So we were left with squealing pipes and less than desirable water pressure, though it was almost decent.

Except for the past few weeks. Some days I get lucky and I have amazing water pressure, but those days are becoming fewer and farther between. Now it seems that I’m lucky to get enough water pressure for the water to even get to the shower head. It has gotten so bad that I now have to ‘run around in the shower to get wet.’ Not because I’m the size of a toothpick but because the water barely makes it a foot past the shower wall, if that much. Good water pressure in the shower is definitely at the top of my ‘want’ list for a new apartment.

CSS and valid coding were far from the focus of most personal sites. External stylesheets? What are those? Heck, some people still flaunted the fact that they did everything with tables. Sites were still designed to “look best in IE6.”

How could I forget the portfolio sites? Everyone thought that they’d be able to strike it rich by throwing up a ‘design portfolio’ and offering custom layouts for $10 a pop. Copyright was hardly an issue when it came to the images that they used in their layouts. I guess I could also toss in the myriad of ‘hosting companies’ that people started off of their reseller accounts.

Now I look around and what do I see? It’s hard to say. Views on CSS and valid coding have definitely changed. I’ve found that some people are somewhat obsessive over everything being standards compliant. Other people blatantly state that they could care less if their website validates. That’s probably enough information for an entirely different post.

Celebrity layouts seem to have gone by the wayside (at least from what I’ve seen). They appear to have been replaced by cute themed illustrations and blog headers that generally contain the site title in some form. Personally I prefer that to some huge image that has a multitude of images of the same celebrity that have been blended and layered to the moon and back, often times with an over contrasted monochromatic color scheme.

One thing that’s really surprised me is the abundance of paid blogging and advertisements. It’s really made me wonder: do people really make that much money off of those posts or advertisements? Do they really think that their visitors want to see advertisements instead of actual content? Bottom line: is it really worth it? I don’t know. It’s not something that I plan to pursue, though plans change. I can’t say that I absolutely would never consider having advertisements or sponsored posts but at this time it’s not something I’m interested in.

That brings me to the matter of blog contents in general. What are people blogging about? Sometimes it’s hard to tell because of the paid advertisements, especially the ones that aren’t visibly marked as such. Some people are still blogging about every day events though I’m convinced that some people need to learn just a little bit of discretion when it comes to posting online. Others focus on technology and the internet in general.

Then there are some blogs where it feels as if the author things that I should be grateful that they deign to dispense their wisdom on whatever the topic at hand is, from a website that has either impressed them or one that they feel needs to be critiqued on everything to views on society in general. I usually feel like I should ask who died and made them the ultimate authority on the subject.

I’m not sure where I was heading with all of this. As I mentioned in the last post I’m still getting back into the swing of all of this. I’m still not sure if I want to have a particular focus for this blog or not. I think I’m going to go with blogging about whatever happens to interest me at the moment. Or about harebrained ideas like this. That works too.