About Jayeless
Jayeless may be considered to be many things, but primarily it is a blog. It is also a personal website, and in combination this makes it a personal blog. Makes sense, right?
This place is where I write about anything that captures my attention long enough for me to finish an entry about it. A whole, wide range of things can capture my attention, so I couldn’t really classify this a “political blog” or a “technology blog” or even an “online diary”, even though I write about politics, technology and my life, because I write about all of these things and am none too thorough about any of them.
I write partially to get my thoughts down but also, in large part, to entertain or inform other people. I appreciate comments. Even on old posts, and even if you disagree with me. Seriously, go ahead and feel free to comment on what you like.
What does “Jayeless” mean?
The short answer is, it means “JLS”. They’re my initials, and look so nice spelt out that I thought it was a fitting site title.
If you want more of a story, then have this. Once upon a time, by which I mean “in mid-2007”, I was looking up articles on Wikipedia about the alphabet. I knew how the letters of the alphabet were spelt in French, but not in English, because no one bothers to actually teach you these things in your native language. So, for instance, I knew that my initials would have been spelt out “ji elle esse” in French, but not how they would have been spelt in English. Wikipedia, however, had all the answers. They’re spelt “jay el ess”.
At the same time, my site then had this really annoying name that I’d invented when I was eleven, and was totally over by then (aged fourteen). Realising how nice my initials looked spelt out and smooshed together, I decided to change the name of my site to “Jayeless”. This is the name it’s had in the two years since, and I’m still not over it yet, so it’ll probably stay this way for a long time to come.
This does mean that it’s pronounced as three syllables (jay-el-ess), not two (jaye-less). I don’t really care if you do pronounce it as two, but please refrain from spelling it wrongly to reflect your pronunciation (“jayless”) because that’s kind of extremely annoying.
A brief history of Jayeless
I began blogging and making websites in 2003, having been introduced to these ideas through Neopets. At first I treated the two quite separately — my blog was hosted on Blogger, before it was subsumed by Google, and my website changed locations every two months. Maintaining a static website couldn’t hold my interest for very long, but blogging became something of a hobby. Back then the website was named “JessieWings”, because “Jessie” was my nickname, and I liked the word “wings” because I felt like it implied freedom of spirit and all sorts of desirable things.
In September 2005, one of my friends (Retti) offered to host me, so I merged my blog and static site together and began to use WordPress. Retti hosted my site for almost three and a half years, across three different domain names (rettinese.com, pirrratey.com and retti.org).
Between the ages of almost thirteen (which I was in September 2005) and January 2008, my site went through a number of gradual transitions and one radical change. Up until mid-2006, my blog entries were mostly hyperactive, illogical rubbish (constituting a kind of diary). Over time my style of writing changed, and by July 2006 or thereabouts, the blog I kept became a calmer, yet still detailed, account of my life — a personal blog. Early in 2007, I reread some of my older entries and felt completely embarrassed by them, so I embarked on a great campaign of historical revisionism, purging, retracting or editing all my least favourite entries.
Until April 2008, my blog remained almost entirely a personal blog — occasionally I posted something about news or writing, but that wasn’t very often. Then, disaster! A routine upgrade of WordPress went badly wrong, and my database got corrupted. I had a backup, but phpMyAdmin refused to restore from it. My backup was useless. Grimly I resigned myself to starting my blog all over again, with five years of data now missing.
Even though it felt like a calamity at the time, this was probably a good thing. For a start, it marked a dramatic end to my great campaign of historical revisionism — it was no longer necessary to rework old entries when there were none to rework! More importantly, it gave me the impetus to refocus my writings. I reduced the amount I wrote about myself and my life, and vastly increased the amount I wrote about the news, or anything that wasn’t myself really. I much prefer the way I write now.
In January 2009, after many months of not even having her own site, Retti let her domain and hosting lapse and I moved to WordPress.com. The extreme restrictiveness of that site compared to a full installation of WordPress got on my nerves, and year 12 kept me busy, so the frequency with which I posted dropped dramatically. Finally, in July, I found Bubble.nu, and applied for hosting there. I received it, and that is where my site remains located now.
Thumbnails of past layouts
Obviously over time I’ve made many more layouts than this, but here are some of those I consider the best and/or most representative.
