Rarely Wears Lipstick is looking a little different at the moment. As my self-hosted WordPress was becoming difficult to maintain with my extremely limited technical knowledge, Topper very kindly sorted out my messy database of a decade’s worth of writing and migrated it to wordpress.com. The plan was to, at some point, revamp the look of the site but to move it all over ‘as is’ for now. Sadly, my trusty old blog theme broke on 14th September and so I had to quickly make some changes so that my site was still readable. I very much doubt that anyone noticed this, as I hadn’t been doing much posting since the Lockdown Clothing project came to a natural end, but I thought the change was worth acknowledging for a number of reasons.
The main reason is that a whole load of old posts are going to look messy as hell on this new theme that I selected and tinkered with in only a few hours. I’d like this post to serve as an apology for some of the disasters that I have not yet spotted or cannot fix… leading me to my second reason. It turns out that copying and pasting text from Google Docs, emails, press releases, websites and a whole host of other sources into WordPress as part of my writing process is a Very Bad Idea. Even when you think you’ve removed all the formatting, you really haven’t, and there are a number of special characters that have caused Topper all kinds of annoyance when the site was moved over. There are also quite a few which remain, and I am currently unable to edit any posts or pages which have them in – including my About page. The third reason for this post is to have a record of the change and how the site looked before (courtesy of this screenshot from the Internet Archive).
Until I find the time and energy to fix everything and/or do a proper revamp of the site, I’ll keep plodding along like this. However, it’s actually been nice to be forced into a break from the past and into pastures new. When I tried closing my blog last year, I knew it was the end of an era, but I didn’t quite know how to move on. I realised that I do still need a place for my writing, I’m just not yet sure what it should look like. Now feels like the right time to draw a line under what’s gone before and move on, so I’m going to spend some time thinking about how best to do that. Perhaps it needs a change of name now too? As anyone who follows me on Instagram knows, I wear lipstick much more often these days!
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