“Wordle” or “Cloudy and Cool with a High Chance of Nifty”

Once upon a time, there was a girl with a blog.

The girl was ready to change up her blog’s look, because she liked to keep things fresh, like that. But she hadn’t gone far when she encountered a snag – to wit, she had to decide on what she wanted to do for the background.

The wallpaper that came with her original “new year, new theme” choice (Blissful Blog, incidentally) was perfectly nice, but the default was just that: The default. Any WordPress blogger could choose that theme and have that wallpaper. She wanted her little piece of the internet to stand out as an individual among blogs. And so that blogger put her creative brain to the task, determined to hit upon the absolutely-close-enough-to-perfect solution to her visual puzzle.

And that blogger… *solemn nods* …was me.

Okay, so much for the prologue. Here’s how it went down:

None of the photos and personal artwork at my fingertips would do. None of them screamed “Ever On Word”, and in time I realized why. None of them were word-centric enough.

It was then that I recalled a post I’d read some while ago from Seven & a Half First Drafts in which was included an image of what was called a Wordle.

What in the world, you may be wondering, is a Wordle?? To quote from the homepage of http://www.wordle.net/, “Wordle is a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide.”

There followed the flash of a light bulb over my head – or perhaps it was lightning zigzagging down from a word cloud. In any case, I knew what I wanted for my background.

To Wordle I went, with my whole first year of blog content copied and ready to paste. I spent a while fooling around with the words’ arrangement, colors, and font before doing myself proud by figuring out how to get the image from the generator to my printer to my flash-drive to my blog, all without having to beg a parent or little sister for aid.

You’d think this would be pretty much the end of the story, but then I discovered that Blissful Blog didn’t have quite the look I wanted after all. So I had to go searching for a theme that did. It’s a good thing I didn’t have any plans for the evening, because I can be very slow and picky when it comes to making a product come out just so.

In the end, the theme that pleased me most was Rusty Grunge; the soft green of the sidebar and scarlet splash at the header appealed to opposing sides of my nature and, very importantly, my word cloud background complimented both. And that brings us to what you’re looking at now, thus ending today’s behind-the-scenes look and what all goes into trying to make things look nice around here.

Spontaneous poll! Which is your favorite word from the cloud?

Here’s what the word cloud looks like when there aren’t any blog posts in front of it.