About Me
The first thing is, I’ve been called Becky most of my life. In fact, I’m still called Becky pretty much all the time. But when I was working at a magazine, I was credited and published as Rebecca, so I registered the domain name to match. I actually answer to them interchangeably, but I’m actually Becky to most people.
The second thing is, I am a huge, huge nerd.
Other than that, let’s see. I’m a 26-year-old farmer’s daughter turned New Yorker. I vastly prefer the city to the country, in large part because I hate cars and hope to never own one. But I can still pull out the quaint country sayings when I want to.
You will be shocked to hear this, but as an urban-dwelling, twenty-something, liberal-arts-educated type, I am rather exceedingly liberal. I just mention it because it comes up on the blog a lot.
Some things I love, in no particular order: Apple computers, Coca-Cola, bookstores, Star Wars, Newsies, Sloan, 24-hour bodegas, the Yankees, High School Musical, warm weather, The Beatles, waterfalls, Nerds, and office supplies.
My greatest hits from the archive:
- Horrible Thoughts, a post which brought me, quite literally, a traffic spike up to a hundred times my average. The post is a critical look at the Joss Whedon’s web serial, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-Long Blog. I’m really proud of both the post itself and of all the discussion it generated in the comments.
- There’s a Reason I’m Not Dating a Nerd, one of my rantier posts. In retrospect, I’d have framed the issue — being fetishized as a female geek — differently, probably, but most of my points remain.
- Gender and the Geek, another post about gender and geekiness.
- On Disney’s Hannah Montanna: Part I, the show’s problems with race and Part II, the show’s issues with gender.
- Playing Dress Up, a post about performing femininity, and how it makes me uncomfortable.
About the Site:
Rebecca-Allen.net is powered by WordPress, an absolutely fantastic blogging/CMS platform. I could go on for hours about how much I love it, but basically, I love that it’s free and sophisticated without being difficult to use. The initial learning curve is pretty steep if you don’t have a somewhat technical background, but once you get started it’s very easy — and very, very powerful. The magic of WP lets me control the details of essentially every aspect of how this site looks and functions.
I use it with the following plug-ins to make it even more powerful:
- Akismet
- AddThis for WordPress
- Beter Tag Cloud
- FD Footnotes
- Flexo Archives
- Google XML Sitemaps
- Live Comment Preview
- Platinum SEO Pack
- Post Avatar
- Sidebar Generator
- Socialite
- WordPress Thread Comment
- WordTwit
I am hosted by the absolutely wonderful Dreamhost, and have been using them for years now. I have very few problems, have gotten great support on the rare occasion I’ve needed it, and generally love them. They make running a site much, much easier for beginners.