Hi Darling Ones,

Back in the early times of blogging I would spend entire weekends headphones on, nose inches from the computer monitor, sucking down cigarettes and Diet Coke while “redesigning” my blog. This was in the time before themes and WordPress and even blogspot. If you wanted to have a fresh new look you had to hand code that shit.

When I say “hand code” I mean you had to right-click & view source on some blog that was sexier than yours, find the bit of code you wanted, copy & paste it into your code, edit the shizz to do exactly what you want, save, and then refresh.

It was exhausting.

I only read four chapters in HTML for Dummies despite being an entire dummy about code. I had to figure out what CSS element corresponded to what thing on my site, design the header, and update the blogroll. All this only happened after agonizing over what my new idea was gonna be. I have no idea how long it took me to come up with the sexy number from August 2002 pictured here.

It was kind of exhilarating too. Once I had everything looking and performing how I wanted I’d be so proud. Probably shouted “I AM A SUPERGENIUS” more than once or twice.

I recaptured the feeling yesterday in a fit of nostalgia fueled by the recent Stereo/Mono purchase and a blip in an RSS Feed that served up new posts despite there being no new posts.

Darling Ones, I spent alllllllllllll day redesigning & updating Paul Westerberg.net, and I can say without a doubt it was the best time I’ve had so far this year.*

I strapped on those headphones and listened to Tegan & Sara’s “Still Jealous,” that new riff they’ve done on “So Jealous.” It felt just like the early-aughts here except I traded the smokes & Diet Coke for a handful of M&Ms (maybe two handfuls) and the cinnamon tea I’m in love with. I also listened to Anaïs Mitchel’s new eponymous record, the Bittersweetheart Valentine’s Mix I’m making, and also a metric crapton of Westerberg & The Replacements.

This was exactly the kind of semi-mindless, tedious, not really but feels like productive work I needed. I was not bored for one single second. I was frequently annoyed, mostly with myself and some of the decisions I made when I started the site back in 2005? 2006? I was filled with glowy nostalgia for all my ol’ Westernerd pals back when we were so excited that Westerberg was farting out a bunch of noise we could download for 50¢. And I was a little bummed to see a few of the ol’ Replacements/Westerberg fansites were no more (and then annoyed again because now I got a bunch of links that got to 404 pages).

Much like I Will Dare dot com, PaulWesterberg.net exists mostly for my own amusement. A lot of it cracks me up because I think I’m hilarious.

There’s not so much activity there for obvious reasons, but when I was fixing each item in the discography on the home page I kept thinking how much I would have loved stumbling on the site when I was a newbie fangirl back in 1996.

Cramming my dreams with computer chips, but I want tambourines & shaking hips,
Jodi

 
*Do recall that I spent the first three weeks of the year down with the COVID and then my BFK’s restaurant caught on fire. So the bar for good times is as low as it gets right now.