🧵Blog Post (n+1): I Swear I Know What I'm Doing

 

🧵Blog Post (n+1): I Swear I Know What I'm Doing

Sometimes people stumble onto Delfik Orakle and assume I have no design taste.
Fair.

But unfair.

Because — and I say this with all due humility — I’ve also created websites like this:
👉 www.fulmo.live

Go on. Click it.
Marvel at the clean lines. The modern layout. The absence of beige-induced sadness.

Yes, I built that.
Yes, I also built this.

Let’s call Delfik Orakle my digital equivalent of a lovingly preserved vintage sweater: slightly itchy, strangely shaped, but full of character.

🧵Blog Post #n: Proof That I Do, In Fact, Have Taste

 

Just for the record:
I can design beautiful websites. Really.

Here’s one example I’m quite proud of:
👉 La Gxoja Filozofio

Clean. Thoughtful. Not even a hint of mauve regret.
See? I’m not entirely trapped in Blogger 2009. I visit the modern web occasionally. I just don’t live there.

Meanwhile, Delfik Orakle and This Here Blog remains my scrappy digital cave. A little dusty, slightly haunted — but home.

🧵Blog Post 5: My Blog's Color Scheme Is a Cry for Help

 

🧵Blog Post 5: My Blog's Color Scheme Is a Cry for Help

Or: This Blog is This Color? Really?

Can we talk about the color scheme?

I don’t know how it happened. I vaguely recall setting “something-or-the-other” as the background in 2011. Might have been beige. That beige has since evolved — nay, mutated — into something resembling sunburnt cardboard. The font color is somewhere between “dusty regret” and “accidental plum.”

It’s not even ironic.

People visit my blog and squint. Not at the ideas — at the contrast. It’s like trying to read poetry carved into an overripe avocado.

I tried fixing it once.
I clicked into Blogger’s Advanced Theme Editor and was immediately offered 400 customizable settings, all helpfully labeled things like:

• Widget Border Hover

• Outer Sidebar Link Glow

• Footer Divider Top Shadow Horizontal (?)

I panicked. Again.
Changed nothing.
Closed tab.
Ate chocolate.

🧵Blog Post 4: Widgets from Another Lifetime

 

🧵Blog Post 4: Widgets from Another Lifetime

Or: I Think That Blogroll Link Is to a Defunct GeoCities Page

Let’s talk widgets. I once had an idea for a new blog style. I worked on it for a little bit. I came up with something.

The sidebar included:

• A blogroll with links to writers who haven’t posted since 2013.

• A broken image that once proudly said “Subscribe to my RSS feed.”

• A hit counter that I think is still working, but I haven’t clicked on it in fear it may bite.

• A quote box that autoloads a single aphorism: “Be yourself; everyone else is taken.” Very 2009. Possibly Oscar Wilde. Possibly my high school teacher. Who knows?

Then, I came right back to this blog.

I’ve considered cleaning this up.

But then I think: isn’t this history?
A digital dig site?
Future archaeologists will stumble across Delfik Orakle and say, “Ah yes, a pre-Instagramian info-hoarder. Fascinating.”

I’ve grown fond of the mess. The widgets are like fossils.
Ugly, irrelevant fossils.
But still fossils.

🧵Bloga Afiŝo Pri Blogado 3: WordPress, My Forbidden Love

 🧵Bloga Afiŝo Pri Blogado 3: WordPress, My Forbidden Love

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Widget Graveyard

Or: The Template That Got Away

I visited WordPress again earlier this week.
Just… browsed. No touching.

There was a theme called... never mind what it was called. It had white space, graceful typography, and a font pairing that whispered calming affirmations to my soul. More than all of that, it had soul.

I stared at it the way one might stare at a minimalist Scandinavian chair one cannot afford.

I clicked “Live Preview.”

For a moment, I imagined a parallel universe:
One where Delfik Orakle wore clean margins and tasteful shadows.
One where my blog looked like it drank green tea and meditated daily.
One where my hyperlinks were centered and emotionally balanced.

But then I looked at my export options and saw:

“Download XML backup file”

Cue dramatic music.
I panicked. I closed the tab. I opened Blogger again like a digital comfort blanket. Yes, it was ugly. Yes, the layout was from 2008. But it was my layout from 2008.

We’ve been through too much together.

🧵Bloga Afiŝo Pri Blogado 2: Oh, So Disappointed With the Look of Blogs

 

🧵Bloga Afiŝo Pri Blogado 2: Oh, So Disappointed With the Look of Blogs

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Widget Graveyard

Let me level with you.

I have always — always — been oh so disappointed with the look of blogs.

Not just my blog. Blogs, in general. Even the well-behaved ones. They either try too hard ("Look, I have parallax scrolling and five kinds of breadcrumbs!") or they don’t try at all ("Here’s my 2011 WordArt header, deal with it.").

And then there’s this one.

Delfik Orakle.

It doesn’t try. It doesn't even pretend to try.

I’ve tweaked things here and there over the years. Moved widgets. Changed background colors. Accidentally broke things. Added a search bar that no one uses, including me.

Once, in a fit of ambition, I spent two hours trying to fix everything using templates. I even was once so ambitious that I tried to fix the header on Blogger.

I failed.

The header remains defiantly off-center — a quiet metaphor for my entire aesthetic life.

Let me be honest:
I’ve been tempted.
Oh yes, I’ve stood at the gates of WordPress, hand on the mouse, seduced by the clean templates and customizable blocks. I’ve whispered:

"One day, I will migrate this whole mess over."

But then reality taps me on the shoulder and says:
“You’ve been using Blogger since before Instagram was even born. Who are you kidding?”

You see, moving all this content would take… effort.
And frankly, I’d rather spend that effort writing about how much I dislike my own blog layout.

So I stay.
I blog.
I squint.
I accept.

This, dear reader, is Blogger.
Not a platform. A state of being. A commitment to inertia. A digital filing cabinet in the cloud with a post-it note that says “please don’t judge me by the fonts.”

And yes — I know it looks ugly.

But you know what?
Sometimes ugly grows on you. But not in this case.

I continue to create beautiful websites. Like this one I created for the La Gxoja Filozofio project. People said it looked very nice. Almost everyone compliment me about it. Yes, this one.

But, yes, sometimes, ugly grows on you.
Like lichen. Or existentialism. Or the word "moist."

So here I remain — typing into the void, under fluorescent serif fonts and widgets from the Paleozoic era — because this is my home.

Welcome back to Delfik Orakle:
Still deconstructed.
Still mildly embarrassing.
Still mine.

🧵Bloga Afiŝo Pri Blogado 1: I Blog, Therefore I Cringe

 

Bloga Afiŝo Pri Blogado 1: I Blog, Therefore I Cringe

Or: A Reflektado on Serif Fonts

Let’s get this out of the way:
I’ve been blogging since the Jurassic era of the internet. Back when dinosaurs roamed Orkut, and Yahoo! Answers was considered a valid form of intellectual debate.

This blog?
It predates Instagram, Pinterest, and whatever new productivity app the cool kids are shilling this week.

But let’s face it.

My blog?
It’s... ugly.
There. I said it.

Tbh, this isn’t even really a blog anymore.
It’s just a mess of content waiting to be inhaled by some future A.I. model with impeccable taste and no judgment.

And when I look at all the beautiful websites I’ve made since — clean, elegant, thoughtfully styled — I come back here and… I weep.
Metaphorically, of course. 🙂
One simply doesn’t weep quite as much when armed with the tools and techniques of La Gxoja Filozofio.

Why is my blog ugly?

The fonts are confused.
The color scheme looks like it was chosen by candlelight during a thunderstorm.
And the layout? Let’s call it "retrospective minimalist with a dash of disappointment."

And yet — I keep posting.

Because this is Delfik Orakle:
My noble, deconstructed, semi-haunted mess of a blog.
A stubborn relic of the past, held together with hyperlinks and misplaced idealism.