I wonder if all bloggers have a hard time with their first entry. I wanted to start with something interesting, but of course when I sat down at the keyboard, every vestige of intelligence fled, and I simply sat here staring dumbly at a blank screen.

This blog is an experiment. I was encouraged to try it by someone named Moira, who lives diametrically opposite me on the continental United States, and whom I've never met.

I learned of Moira's existence by reading my Web server's logs. I do this frequently, partly to help me find bad links and learn what areas of my site get the most traffic, under the delusion that I will someday beef up the content of the more popular areas. But I also read my server logs because I enjoy seeing what's on the sites that link to my pages.

Thus, when I discovered that someone was linking to my Latin Mottoes pages, I followed the referrer logs back to her blog, where I discovered that, like me, she had been a Cloudmaker, trying to figure out who murdered Evan Chan. (No, nobody really died; it was ostensibly a Web promotion for the movie A.I., but it turned out to be so much more. And it had very little to do with the movie.)

Anyway, Moira convinced me to try my own blog. I taught myself PHP last week, and felt that this would be good practice, so I hacked together some skeleton blog code; right now, it just handles posting and reading, but those are the two essential functions. The truly maddening part is trying to ensure that everything works properly under all of the major browsers. Especially Netscape 4.76, which utterly sucks at adhering to the CSS standard.

So that is the why and how of this Weblog. Probably not a very exciting first post, but I suppose it's better than a blank screen.

At least, I hope it is.

Verbum emissum non est revocabile.
(At least until I get the remove/edit functions written.)