Stephen Monrad

Building new site.

I won’t be posting for the next little while because I’m working on revamping the mechanics of my site. I should be back to regular posting in a week or two.

My strategy of posting weekly hoping to give people time to comment on posts isn’t working. I’m going to return to more frequent posts. Probably not every week day like before. I’ll try every other day or so to see how that works out.

I’m also going to try using a lot more headings. The idea is to make my posts easy to skim read. This will hopefully make it easier for people to quickly get the gist of a post so that they can decide if they want to read it more carefully. I’m doing this because I have found that I like posts where the main points are highlighted.

I’ve decided to start a new blog focusing on how we make choices. I think I need to do more than just say we aren’t rational so markets don’t work. I need to explore how exactly we make decisions and choices so that I can explain exactly why markets fail.

I decided to start a separate blog because I think a different audience might be interested in how the mind works. I also plan to follow paths that may not directly relate to economic problems. If you are interested in how the mind works, come visit my new blog.

I’m going to keep this blog alive too. I will continue to write posts about my economic ideas. I will summarize themes that I develop on my new blog here if they are relevant to economics.

I have been working on setting up my website and am finding it to be very tedious. It’s dificult to get spacing and page layout to look nice.

I am trying to create a navigation pane that has links that are indented to show that they belong to the category above. As far as I can tell, there isn’t an easy way to do this. I have resorted to using a command   that inserts a space that won’t collapse. I the repeat the command for as many spaces as I need to get the indent I want. Needless to say, my HTML is now littered with &nbsp’s.

I should probably be using a content management system of some sort. I am afraid to do this because I have read that content management systems can mess up search engines. The spider programs that search engines send out looking for new sites have trouble with dynamic content on sites. So, instead of handling formatting behind the scenes, I have to work on format for each and every page I produce.

Now, while this is painful and slow, I am perhaps learning something through the process. Understanding how HTML works is probably a good thing. I have a lot more respect now for web designers who can produce complex user friendly websites.

I have decided that I am going to build this website live bit by bit. Instead of producing a polished product offline and only posting my work publicly when I am done, I am going to keep the whole website live.

This means that the site may undergo significant restructuring from time to time as I find better ways to organize the information. I also haven’t decided on a final name for my economics ideas. For now I am going with “Accessible Economics.” This is a bit of a mouthfull though, so I may change it later on.

If you notice any problems or don’t like something you see, let me know. You can either comment on a post or email me from the feedback link. I will respond to all emails I receive.

This is a brief post to congratulate myself for getting my blog up. While the Wordpress software is quite user friendly, I have done quite a bit of fooling around with it to get it the way I want it. I have installed and uninstalled it several times and toyed with using several different themes. I even tinkered with the css code page at first before I realized that there were premade themes to use.

My main focus now is developing and publicising my economics ideas. I am not going to explain what they are here. The website StephenMonrad.com will have a whole section devoted to them.  This blog is going to focus on the process and the things I learn along the way.