i’ve probably used the phrase “content drives design” at least a thousand times or so when discussing “doing websites” for people. i typically throw it out there as a means of discerning how serious people are about creating a site and as an attempt to not do a site for that person. sites are interesting ideas but when it comes down to generating content, people typically kinda, well, yeah…
i should know, i’ve had this site since ’01 and a domain in my name since ’99 and i’ve generated enough content to fill a fly’s navel. although being a fairly prolific writer over certain points in my life, those spurts of brilliance production typically amounted to “responding to lots of posts on other people’s messageboards.”
i’ve used a couple of different tools over the years to capture my ongoing commentary. the first was a custom CF script that i wrote for myself. i’ve also used movable type and now use WordPress. i first used MT because i wanted to learn something different than CF. MT was cool, but, after stepping away from updating i “switched” to WordPress because of the one-click install offered by my hosting company. because my host has eliminated basically all of my effort to setup a mysql database, upgrade my files and all the other garbage that can become a hassle, i’ve been able to spend more time installing plugins, hacking themes, and adding functionality via custom fields and conditional tags.
over the course of time i’ve noticed something that i never thought of before — the addition of certain plugins offered me the ability to write in new ways. this completely goes against my basic beliefs that writing determines tools. the footnotes plugin stands out as one of those things that took something from my natural writing style (the usage of double parentheses) and transformed it into proper clickable footnotes ((see, the thing is, i have used double parentheses as a means of diversionary asides for some time now. they aren’t necessary to the current line of thought, but sometimes extend from it. their really weren’t any hard & fast rules to what goes in a single or double parantheses in my writing until i installed the footnote plugin and realized that some of these pre-plugin thoughts that would have got a double were necessary for the following sentence — thus, making them a single parentheses or “inline” aside)). so, after i turned footnotes on, i needed to style those footnotes, which got me digging around in the css for my template.
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