Myspace may seem like a distant dying star, but the concept behind it was quite alluring. The idea of having my own digital space was too tempting to ignore. I eagerly set up my profile, changed my background picture, and spent an hour or two taking that cool black-and-white sunglass photo that was destined to be my online image, regardless of its forced nature. I liked that I could allow people into my space, and they could essentially leave their tag on my profile. It was rewarding at first, in a way that only voyeurists can truly understand, but the novelty quickly began to wane. The glitter fonts and spam images that began to invade my sacred space were a reminder of the pointlessness of it all. Yes it was “my” space, but there was nothing to do there. It was essentially a room with no toys, and the only thing to do was to unapologetically annoy others with my boredom. This gradually brought me to the blogosphere, which was not only a place where I could control my territory, but a place where I could truly share interests and experiences as well. I wanted to gain something from people that had more experiences, not just spit out blurbs informing others of my lack of motivation or my consumption of adult beverages. The purpose of blogging is to be part of a community, while the purpose of social networking is to tell people that you’re blogging or getting hammered, whatever the case may be.

“You are a product of your environment” was always a phrase that I took as a pile of flaming excrement, but nomatter how much I strived to fight the everlasting doldroms brought on by living with my parents and studying something that meant nothing to me, the phrase was inescapable. I think I hate this phrase so much because it promotes hopelessness; yes, I may be a product of my environment, but what kind of environment can’t be shaped by the people that inhabit it? The answer happens to be engineering, but the point is that I need to surround myself with people and experiences that not only shape the person that I am, but allow me to shape them as well. This is what makes design, specifically web design, something that I deem worthy of being my hobby. The best part of design is its fluidity. It took quite a bit of effort to decide to change career tracks and locations, but it takes merely hours and perhaps a bit of coffee to redefine online spaces. Uninhibited by physical limitations, the web can be anything we want it to be.

Blogging was great, but it wasn’t until I discovered CSS that things truly started to take off. CSS stands for “Cascading Style Sheets” and knowing how to use CSS allows for an unparraleled level of creativity on the web. I moved my blog to my own domain, Techandramen.com, and nervously tried to create edit the theme code to display Twitter posts. My design hobby essentially began by cutting and pasting various bits of code into random WordPress files, and I soon realized that this was going to be a slow and painful process, if I didn’t change how I looked at the problem. So what did I do? I volunteered to create a school blog for the International Co-op Program. I had no experience with working with PHP or CSS, but I figured that if I committed to doing it, I’d be forced to figure things out. I ended up purchasing this blog’s current theme and used the same theme for the school blog. I started hunting for video tutorials, because books were too epically slow. I ended up using the theme in stock form, aside for a few things that my trial and error process allowed me to fix.

I eventually ended up at css-tricks.com and gave myself a year to achieve the lofty goal of creating a from-scratch WordPress theme. For anyone but the novice this would be extremely simple, but for me it was daunting. There’s an excellent three-part tutorial on css-tricks that literally takes the unassuming viewer from the beggining of design to full coding of the site. The building of the Co-op Blog took somewhere around a month to complete, from start to finish, but by the end of it I’d achieved my goal of building a blog from nothing more than a skeleton. It was a bit ugly at first, but with some refinement I made the blog into something that was a functional and visual improvement over the original.

Why am I bothering you with this? My lust for a space that I am satisfied with has yet to be quenched, and my first design project was merely a stepping stone to updating the Tech and Ramen site. It’s time to make this site an environment that’s worth occupying, and I’ve begun the concepting phases of the site redesign. I’m hoping to create a new page that will contain the up-to-date version of the new blog design, starting from the bare bones and continuing to final design and transition. With luck and perhaps some insight, the end product will be a significant improvement.