A reader and fellow blogger writes in to ask how much of this blog is me and how much is WordPress.

The content is all me. The WordPress team keeps sending me Shakespeare anagrams, but I have not published any yet. Frankly, they aren’t very good.

The tech is all them. Do you have any idea how hard it is to create and manage a MySQL database? Neither do I, and I don’t need to. There is some minor tech stuff you need to do to get set up, but I was fortunate to have veteran blogger Ro of Pensive Musings as a personal tutor, and was able to get it set up without a problem.

The design is a combination of me and them. WordPress uses a technology called Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that allows you to use a pre-made design to format the information in your MySQL database. I used this one, though obviously I made a lot of modifications. I made the font bigger and darker, removed the buttons from the top, created a new title banner, changed the picture, changed the quote box, etc. A lot of this was trial and error, and thanks to readers who gave me feedback, and to my visually-gifted sister who checked the blog after each update and reported by phone how each change looked from remote.

But the credit for the real heart of this blog goes to you, the reader. To those of you who answer the Questions of the Week and the Thursday Morning Riddles. To the Conundrum solvers and the Francis Bacon linkers. To the silly and the serious, to the friends and strangers, and to the anonymous posters too. To DeLisa and Annalisa and Andrew and Brian and Neel Mehta and K-Lyn and UnixMan and Susan and Lee and Bronx Richie and DB and Duane and Kenneth W. Davis and Ro and to everyone else who has posted here. And to the those of you who read along silently too. Without all of your visits and contributions, there would be very little reason for me to continue to do this.

Shakespeare Teacher will turn eleven months on Saturday.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 at 10:46 am and is filed under Meta, Shout Out, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.