February 26th, 2010
This page doesn’t look like I want it to just yet. In fact, I am feeling a little of that “one step forward, two steps back” thing going on with ye ol website. I’ll eventually get around to writing an intro that will include this general synopsis, but I am pretty much doing this on my own. That doesn’t mean I don’t have amazingly gifted friends who are ready and willing to offer advice and feedback at their earliest convenience (b/c I do – and in droves. I think part of the reason I feel so compelled to have this website is because of how many close personal friends of mine are absolutely brilliant at how they use the internet – and they love me and encourage me as often as possible, so I am truly grateful for all that). What it means, is, as mentioned previously, I’m kind of fucking clueless, which I wasn’t expecting.
How so? Let me just map out the last couple weeks. This isn’t a bitch session at all – instead I am hoping to think out the problems I have had so I can better understand them. Actually, what would be amazing is if one day, these writings actually helped someone else with creating and navigating their own web presence without making the mistakes I am. But for now, this is probably just for me.
Starting a few weeks ago, I finally started hosting severebass.com. I went w. Site5 on the recommendation of a friend, eventually deciding on them because their customer service was highly praised, their website interface looked more navigable then the main competition, and I found a coupon to save some money on my purchase. I don’t regret that decision at all.
However, my first confusion was with making sure the domain name, purchased dirt cheap through Active Domain actually transferred through to site5 (which it did). Then came logging into Site5 iteself – not too bad. Site5 also made it easy to point severebass to my current wordpress blog – nice. Things got tricky however when I tried to get a similar domain (severemusick.com – which is on my business cards) to go to severebass (and eventually the wordpress blog – for now). I thought I set up the dns servers correctly, but the controls over at Domain Panel suggested things would be more straight forward. I sent a couple emails to their Tech Support, getting the most basic reponse – eventually they told me my dns servers were set up correctly (note: on more then one occasion I did a search for what the fuck dns servers actually did and how to use them and didn’t find much that made sense to me – meh). Finally, after mentioning this to my little brother (a very smart guy and electronic engineer), he took on the task himself. He set up the parked domain (which I completely missed), and then when things didn’t work that way, emailed site5 on my behalf, and they made sure things were working correctly.
Sweet! Now I needed to tackle my FTP access. I used ftp explorer first as I already had a download of it in my folders somewhere, but while I could view the _incoming folder, and it seemed like I Could upload to it, nothing showed up. So I gave FileZilla a shot (At the recommendation of site5), and got similar, if not worse results. I figured I was missing something basic (as my little bro had put up a quick html page) and sent him screenshots. It turned out that even though site5 had a place for me to CREATE ftp accounts, what I really needed was my generic log-in in order to access the real files. Easy enough, I made the change. ONE STEP CLOSER!
Or so I thought. That evening I met w. my consultant, who after I plied w. half a carafe of sangria, started to look at what I was trying to do – specifically and overall. I spent the first half of the meal explaining myself and the last bit showing my consultant my strategies – things like my own personal workplan, a line-item-list of the columns and subcolumns I want in this site, as well as some of the basic functionality.
At least three times I heard: migrate your wordpress blog into site5. I was told this was quite easy, that using a 3rd party option known as Fantastico, this would all make sense. Which I did – I started a new blog at severebass.com/blog (which you are now reading). I had been under the impression that this would just mean linking my pre-existing wordpress blog into my site5 account – with more fancy-schmance options coming. Instead I found out I had created a separate blog, within severebass.com (currently directing immediately to severebass.wordpress.com). When I went back to my consultant making sure this was correct, I was assured that yes, I just need to now import my existing wordpress blog into the one I had just created.
This wasn’t too strange to me – I’d already tried this when I FIRST created severebass.wordpress.com. I’d done as much when I first tried to import my old blogspot. I realized I couldn’t choose the posts – so EVERYTHING came flooding through. It took me several sessions to delete all the old tags. But what I WASN’T aware of is that the attachments were still there – which ones? I don’t know. But instead of 4 or 5 posts, I imported over 140 items to the blog – and I don’t know what they are.
What I want to do with the blogspot is to store it all – separately – in it’s own /blog/archive folder. If I can get the tags to work JUST in that space, that would be sweet. If not – fuck the tags. Most of them are me messing around anyway.
This isn’t all so bad – I can navigate it. The biggest pisser (of the moment at least) is that the theme I was using in severebass.wordpress cannot be found now that I’ve migrated. The theme wasn’t perfect – but I liked it. It was black and red, with a customizable header, and called “Neo-Sapien” by Small_Potato. It, nor anything quite the same, is nowhere to be found now that I’ve moved. I can get around this as well, but it’s just a BIT FRUSTRATING.
It seems my next steps here are:
- find a theme I can work with for now
- from that theme, create the page wrapper I want to use and figure out how to apply it
- start setting up my pages up non-publicly while I start to pull things together
- figure out the best way to start upping severebass.com as the #1 google hit
- learn more about this “categories” stuff I hear about and how it works
-
find out where to add my gravatar now that I’m signed in this way!!(answer – themes/widgets)
I’m sure I have more things I need to do, but I’ll start with these. It will be totally sweet when I one day look back at this blog and am amused by how little I understood things…:)
P.S. In case my tone isn’t clear here, all my friends who give me free advice are all complete professionals (and in the case of my consultant – probably a genius) for whom I have the utmost respect and appreciation for. My own frustrations lie in my wishing that I the internet will not read my brain, so I’ve spiced the post with plenty of hyperbole for effect. XO – Severe
P.P.S. Let this be the last blog post i publish before thoroughly proofreading.
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