January 7, 2009
Wednesday

Who’s that girl?
Where’s she from?
            — John Shanks and Charlie Midnight
                American composers and music producers writing for Hillary Duff

I’ve been doing this kind of self-exposure for almost ten years, always under my own name, always with identifying details about my location, my movements in the world (I gave everything but the room number in the hotel in writing about my recently-concluded trip to New York City), and the other day I even gave a fairly personal detail about my weight. I have nothing to hide and I do stand behind every assertion I make, but I do make decisions about which details are too intimate to reveal and which topics that are too sensitive to discuss. I know that this is a public site that anyone can access. I tell it like it is and I name names.

Except my own.

When I started this endeavor back in February of 1999, I assembled the pages in simple HTML using Netscape Composer, a WYSIWYG program that showed me how what I was typing would look on the screen while it assembled the code in the background. (If you’ve never seen code, go up to the top of your window, under the address bar, click “View” and then click “Source.” A new window will open that will show you the morass of symbols and commands that deliver the content to you in a form you can understand.) I learned only enough about the language to overcome some limitations of Composer. This served me well for several years.

My original index page survives. (You can see it if you click on the words “index page” in the previous sentence.) Some of my older pieces (through 2005) are still available in the old hand-coded style. It is an ongoing project to redo them for the style of presentation I am using now (most of the “four years ago” links I gave in my Holidailies pieces had to be converted so I could include them). By 2005 the changes in how web content is prepared for presentation outstripped my ability to learn how to implement them. In 2006 I started using WordPress, a content management system that automatically delivers my content after I type it into a composing window.

But because of my limited understanding of how to manipulate the automated features, I lose something every time I change the design or every time a new version of the WordPress script comes out. And sometimes I’m not even aware that such a thing has happened.

Yesterday I did become aware that it is difficult for a new reader or a casual reader to discover much about me. My name is not prominent (it appears only in italics in my gmail address and in a very small font in the authorship line beside the title of the post), nor is there any “about” page that talks about me, only one that talks about the genesis of the title.

So I’m doing some things to fix that. I put “Personal Essays by Margaret DeAngelis” under the journal title, although it’s light orange on dark orange, so it might be easy to miss. And I’ve created an “about” page for myself. So if you’re wondering, who’s that girl?, go here to find out.

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