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WordPress is great place for writers. But what about for artists? Are your needs fulfilled by the built in tools WP provides, or do you rely on plugins to present your images the way you want them to look?

Is there a theme that works best for you, or does it lack certain features? Are you concerned about your images being copied or reused in some way without your consent?

Do you prefer to present your images on your site or on social media? What are the pros and cons of either approach?

These are some of the questions I’m hoping to answer over the next few months as I build a theme optimized for artists, and other folks for whom presenting their images online is the primary purpose for having a site.

How do we prove we are the owners of our content? It’s trickier than you might think.

People who debate about whether or not this or that pizza is the best in the world are missing the point.

Pizza is all about context. It’s different in different places because it needs to be. It reflects the unique lifestyle of a particular area.

Here’s how I see the two styles I’m most familiar with: NYC and Buffalo

NYC

Thin, wide, flat, lots of surface area. Dry, dusty, charred (in places) crust. Fold it, always fold it, but watch out for that grease trough you just made; it’ll get on your favorite sweats and leave a stain; stuff a napkin back there, or better yet, sop up that grease with a few paper towel pats to begin with.

You eat it on the go; you just arrived for a weekend tryst, hungry and cramped from sitting in a plane, then a car, for hours. You need to get to the hotel, arena, playhouse, friend’s apartment, whatever, or you’ll “be late”; there’s always that delay of game penalty you’re running from.

You’re in between things; just been shopping but have some time to kill before the opening. You’re tired; walking all day will do that. You stumble across a glassy exterior with those levels of steamy goodness calling to you from the interior. People are standing in line. In you go, “a slice of plain please”. Whatever the word for pizza chef wields an enormous wooden paddle, slings a cold slice into gigantic steel multitiered cavern, from which emerges your piping hot slice. You shake on a mountain of flavor from the “free toppings tray” as my friend Kip always called it—garlic salt, parmesan cheese, oregano and crushed red pepper—and off you go, back into the maelstrom.

NYC Pizza is NYC. It’s delicious, hot, messy, and made for the constant onslaught of the masses, hungry and late, needing a full, hot belly to keep up.

Buffalo

Fat. Doughy. Thick. Soggy, but with crispy bits strategically implemented throughout; the edges of the pepperoni, the apex of the crust, which when examined resembles the surface the moon.

You’re at a gathering: a party, an event, a celebration, and expecting to eat something. You’re pretty hungry, hangry is more like it. After all, this is Buffalo. People get hangry a lot, driving to and from these gatherings, usually through layers of ice and wind that coat everything.

Eating is a respite. I don’t know how much I want; I just want to dive in. Show me to the party; let me get my party on.

You don’t buy a slice in Buffalo. You buy a pizza. It’s either a party pizza, or a sheet, or a half sheet. It doesn’t come round; if it does, it’s usually kinda squarish, like they are so used to doing angles and can’t shake off the muscle memory for the rare round order.

The pizza is cut up into little chunks. Nothing, really. So easy to grab another one. So likely a perfect bowl of heaven will reside there: that quarter sphere of pepperoni, the rim brown-almost-black, remnants of a combination of olive oil and liquid lard swirled at the bottom, so small it is likely completely uncut, posted there in glory on a field of mozzarella.

What’s that, over there? Wings! Of course. Let’s grab a few of those; some blue cheese as a rule. Oops; my pizza dropped into my dip (or was it the other way around? Queue the old Reeses PBC commercials). All the better; the tang of blue cheese is an amazing complement to the sweet, spiciness of Margherita pepperoni-laden Buffalo style pizza.

Bottom Line

Pizza is too general a term for that staple of our diets, and can’t be compared from one region to another. It’s all about how we eat it.

Just made this. It’s not quite bad.

• 1lb ground beef
• 1 jar salsa
• 1 can baked beans
• 1 tbsp chili powder
• 1/2tbsp paprika
• 1tsp cumin
• 1tsp ground black pepper
• 1/2tsp salt
• 1 can beer

Brown and drain the beef. Mash it up with a fork or something.

Throw in the other ingredients. Simmer for an hour.

In the beginning, format was king. The mere fact that we were reading something on the web made it important. It had somehow come to occupy this new medium, which in itself was novel and beautiful and confusing. Whoever put it there had to be smart, and therefore the content as well.

Then, at some point, maybe the early 2000’s, content became king. Your format is getting in the way of our content, we’d say. Enough of the tables, the flash, the jpeg-rendered text. Let us read <pre> formatted courier and be fulfilled.

Then context became king; it was more important where, when, and how readers got the content than what the content actually was. Can I read it on my iWatch? Because that’s how I read stuff nowadays. Is it RTL compatible? Pft, how dare we ignore half the world (if not more)’s readership.

Contrast is next. It’s all we have left. Is it different than what I’ve seen before? Does it stand out? In my daily sea-of-noise, what clambers to the surface, bobbing aggressively for attention like some snagged snapper float? That’s what I’ll read.

I don’t even know what that is
I read something about a 20 million dollar loss
Whose loss? How does one even lose 20 mill?

I spend the next 20 minutes looking for a new car
In the classifieds, and land on one like new
Kelly green
Olds, only 40k and just inspected

I call the number, Al answers
This is Al
Hi, can I see the olds?
Who is this? Jerry?
And I hang up

I settle on an editorial, someone thinks the war on milk needs to end