March 8th, 2010
So, I’ve made some progress dealing w. this website – but this silly internet seems to love doing the “one step forward, two steps back” dance. Let’s review, shall we?
I messed around w. some other themes, but really didn’t like them – however I did learn more about using Fantastico to install my wordpress onto my blog, and eventually decided I needed to learn FTP a bit more anyway. So I:
- * Installed wordpress via the “five minute install”. This actually took me a couple hours – first I installed everything in my blog2 subdirectory to get used to everything. It took me a while because I had to re do this about 5 times. (The biggest issue – I wasn’t recognizing “localhost” as the database host – doh!) Then I uninstalled the fantastico installment and deleted the blog2 subdirectory. Both these steps were pretty easy but then I realized how much site5/fantastico had done for me in creating the first one. I ended up having to clear out all of my tables, which took a little digging. However, I was eventually successfull in all of this – and really I have to admit that the site5 interface made this ABOUT as easy as possible.
- * Next up I wanted to learn how to use themes a little bit more without depending on wordpress. Apparently my previous theme (Neo-Sapien) was no longer compatible w. wordpress, despite that the upgrade I made was only an edition or two. Frustrated with the lack of other themes, I searched some more and eventually found the link to download it directly. After a little fumbling around, I eventually figured out how to upload it via FTP and eventually get my dashboard to recognize it. SUCCESS! (?)
- * Sort of. The site is currently in Neo-Sapien, but I can’t use any widgets. Fair enough, I go to http://codex.wordpress.org/Widgetizing_Themes to follow the instructions there. I think I do things correctly – however using one of the fixes, I am still not able to use themes in my dashboard. When I use the other one, my site disappears telling me there’s an $end error in line 36 or something. I know a little html, but not enough to trouble shoot this, so I’m currently SOL.
- * I also had some issues getting my new admin account to synch up with the previous posts Severe has made on the pre-uploaded version of wordpress, but that wasn’t too bad. What was frustrating was that my gravatars took a long time to enable – I’m still not entirely sure what I did to get them to work, but they should be showing up now. Other people’s gravatars worked – just not mine.
So, I’m making progress, but it feels dreadfully slow. I still need to figure out how to customize this theme enough (or get a new one that looks similar as the black/red scheme is really what I’m looking for). Then I’ll need to tweak it as I remember some of the previous widgets I had not being snazzy enough. Eventually I think I’ll be able to get this all under control so the website feels coherent – and then the real work will begin. I’ve yet to start fucking around w. pages and categories vs. standard blog posts. And this is all just the groundwork – after that’s done I’m going to need to start putting together content and organizational pages. My previous goal was to launch officially sometime by the end of April – I have no freaking idea if that is achievable at this point, but will keep it as my goal.
However, it’s not all in vain – I have learned a bunch about FTP and page editing, and while it’s not especially hard or snazzy, I did configure this on severebass.com/blog all by myself. I really appreciate how much free support is out there for folks such as myself – I just wish it didn’t make me feel so freaking stupid sometimes.
BUT, first things first – I’m going to get a page or two set up (probably cursory pages for now) so you can SEND ME MONEY! I’m also getting more comfortable w. my laptop – it’s minor stuff, but I’m using my mouse, monitor, and keyboard from my desktop through my laptop and I forget my computer is even running sometimes because the fan noise thats associated w. my desktop isn’t there!
EDIT Now I have a new level of frustration as my ul and il wickets aren’t working – but it shows up correct in my visual preview. WHAT GIVES? (I’m guessing it has something to do w. my theme….grrr)
For posterity’s sake, here’s what my homepage looks like right now – again, I can’t wait to come back and laugh at how far I’ve come someday…..
Let's hope I'm eventually embarrassed by this
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