Steve Cooper

These are my initial impressions to using Wordpress, the blog engine I’m now using for the site.

First some background; I’ve done web development before, so this is an area I’m comfortable with. Honestly, though, the only skills you need are the abilities to edit a text file and to use FTP.

Installation was actually really easy. Download the application from Wordpress, edit a config file, upload everything, view a installation wizard on the web, and it’s up. So, getting hold of a basic site was really very simple, certainly compared to other blog engines and cms’s I’ve tried

What’s really nice, though, is the ability to add themes and plugins. Themes are visual ’stationary’ for the site, and there is a master site which has loads of themes to choose from. just download a theme’s zip file, and unpack it into a themes folder, and it’s ready to go. Plugins are about as easy, too; plugins provide some clever additions to the site. For example, I’m using the slickr plugin to show my flickr photos, and [reCAPTCHA] to keep spambots out of my comments.

I’m just starting to use markdown, a simple markup language that looks a lot like the old plaintext email syntax common on the early intarpipes.

 Here's how you write **bold** and _italics_, and
 here's how you write a link to [stevecooper.org][scorg]

   [scorg]: http://www.stevecooper.org

which turns into

Here’s how you write bold and italics, and here’s how you write a link to stevecooper.org

this words with Wordpress which powers this blog, and is also available as a little script to turn your plain ole text files into lovely html. Nice if you’re more comfortable using plain text over html. Or if, like me, you’ve got a huge chunk of stuff already written in it…

Have you ever considered that science fiction may not be a genre?

People are always looking for ways to categorise art, and to group together things they like and things they don’t. It’s quite natural for people to lump together all the books with common elements.

I don’t want to try to offer a definition of sci-fi, but in common use, “sci-fi” is applied to books with speculative technology like nanotech, spacecraft, AI, or faster-than-light travel, or alien worlds or characters.

Problem is, that doesn’t really define what the story is about; is it a slasher movie, like Alien; a horror, like Event Horizon; a fairy tale, like Star Wars; or a kung-fu move, like The Matrix?

What I’m really wondering is, if someone says they like Science Fiction, what the hell do they mean? Have they told you anything about their tastes?

The two posts which inspired me; - “What Do You Hate Most About Short Science Fiction” - Hub Magazine’s post that alerted me to it.

I’ve been trying to roll my own blog software for far too long. Finally I’ve given in and let Google take over. Welcome to my new blog. You never know. Now that it’s easier for me to post, I might actually do so!