breakthesky.neti'll break the sky, for you and i are going nowhere.

I’ve had my current theme up since January 1. It’s a very nice theme and has everything that I want. Lately, though, I’m getting tired of looking at this theme and have been searching for a new theme in which to dress up my blog. The search has been rather difficult though, as I’m not a designer and my skills are pretty much limited to very minimal WordPress theme editing. I keep finding themes that have designs that I like but are limited in theme functions.

Recently, I found the most amazing theme ever. It’s perfect and I know that it is the absolute greatest theme I could use for my blog. However, functions-wise, it’s lacking the following:

• Threaded comments
• Links to “Previous” and “Next” entries at the bottom of the page
• There are also ad links embedded in the footer with some weird coded thing… I don’t know what the technical term is but hopefully this can be solved by viewing the source of the footer

I don’t think adding these functions in the theme is hard; it’s just that I am completely lacking in any sort of HTML/PHP/WordPress theme skills. So… any kind souls out there willing to take a look at the theme and help me out with adding the above functions? If so, please comment or send me an email at disalarming@gmail.com. I will lavish you with my eternal undying love and gratitude, with the promise of buying dinner if you happen to visit my city!

I have always toyed with the idea of making this blog known among my offline friends and acquaintances. While I’ve never kept this blog a secret from my offline counterparts, I’ve never come right out and talked about it, either. I mean, I wouldn’t lie and say I didn’t have a blog and/or I am not the person behind this blog if they somehow discovered it, but blogging has never been part of any of our conversations and I’ve always just left it at that. My strategy was always unless I got outright asked about whether or not I had a blog, there was no need to discuss it.

Recently, this internal debate about whether or not to “reveal” (for lack of better term) this blog to my offline life has become a more timely issue, since I will be going abroad all of next year. Lots of kids have travel blogs they use as a way of keeping friends and family updated about their travels; I’ve been asked whether or not I’ll have a travel blog of my own. The idea of creating a travel blog as well as maintaining this one is more than I’d like to have on my plate when abroad. Since it’s never been an option for me to abandon this blog, abroad or not, I’ve been thinking whether or not I just share this blog with the offline world.

I have always written this blog with the mindset that if someone offline discovered my blog and/or I decided to open up about it by linking to it on my Facebook profile, there’d be nothing for me to hide. I don’t slag off specific people, air dirty laundry or reveal secrets that I wouldn’t reveal offline. When I talk about work, family and friends, I’ve always been guarded. (Hey, I don’t want to get dooced.) With all that in mind, what, really, is keeping me from publicly acknowledging that I have a blog that I regularly update and (I hope) is at least semi-interesting?

I guess it’s the fact that this blog, for all purposes offline, is a relatively private outlet. If I tell people about this blog and they read it when I’m abroad, chances are they aren’t going to stop reading it when I return. I guess that’s where the area of contention is for me. There’s no guarantee that anyone in my offline life will follow my blog at all but once they know about it, they aren’t going to forget my blog exists.

I came across this map of “International Number Ones” that indicates which country in the world is best at what. The idea behind it is that every country is the best at something; therefore, every country is number one in one thing or another.

Good ol’ USA seems to be number one in serial killers. Somehow, this doesn’t surprise me. And hey, it’s good to know that the USA is good for something, right? ;D

On a completely unrelated note, if the car alarm outside my house that has been going off for the past hour doesn’t get turned off soon, I might resort to doing something completely drastic that I refuse to be held accountable for.