I was up very late last night trying to change the font size in my last two posts. No matter how many times I changed the font to 13 pt and saved it, it just didn’t work. The very first post is in 13 pt font. The second post was in 13 pt, but now it’s not. I’m not really sure why. Maybe I skipped something I shouldn’t have in Lisa Sabin-Wilson’s book, WordPress for Dummies.
Now I’m not admitting I’m a Dummy, but…
Shame on me, I’ve broken one of John Chow’s fundamental rules of successful blogging (John Chow dot com, the Blogger’s Guru), I didn’t keep to my self-imposed, and totally voluntary, posting schedule. Forgive me John for I have lapsed, it’s been more that a week since my last post.
Going into this endeavor I fully intended to update this blog at least once a week. Fortunately, life got in the way of my best intentions. After all, it’s Spring Break week, Easter Sunday is only a day away, and Pass Over is around the corner. I also had a rush of update work for some of my web design clients (I’m not complaining). Like a lot of you, I may have bitten off a little more than I can chew, but I fully intend to try to do better in the future.
I can report that the learning curve for WordPress is about what I originally thought it would be (relatively straight forward and easy to figure out for someone familiar with web design software). I am still working my way through WordPress for Dummies by Lisa Sabin-Wilson. It’s a great book and it lends itself to skipping over the stuff you really don’t need to learn. It should keep me form having to backspace too often.
I still haven’t gotten around to installing Visual Studio 2008 Express and I might not have the time to do so for a few weeks. For now, I’ll be concentrating on honing my WordPress skills and reporting all my stumbles to you (and successes too).
I’ve been using Microsoft’s FrontPage (with one six-month dalliance into the realm of Dreamweaver) since I started designing website. I don’t use FTP very often
nor do I often have the occasion to install software on my web servers. That presented me with my first major decision, Do fumble through installing Wordpress myself or do get someone to help me? It actually wasn’t much of a decision at all. When I was perusing the WordPress.org website’s installation instruction, I was offered the opportunity to have WordPress installed for FREE, by professionals.
Once I decided to take install4free.wordpress.net up on their generous offer to install WordPress, the process was surprisingly easy. Five simple steps and twenty minutes later WordPress was installed on GoToPlace.com’s web server. I had to go through three pages of Terms and Conditions that were, again surprisingly, not written in indecipherable legalese, and then answer the following questions:
Once I answered all the questions, I submitted my request and I was soon on my way to Blogging.
You might have noticed that I changed the font for my posts from Century Gothic to Arial Unicode MS (both 13pt). I wanted a font that would be easier to read (I’m hopeful that someone will read this, eventually). It didn’t work very well, but I decided not to change it back to the old font. After all, it’s part of my learning curve.
I’ve been designing and developing websites for about eight years. Most of my work has been for small to medium size businesses. Like a lot of one-man web design shops, I borrowed ideas and code from websites that I thought were good.
I’ve recently decided that I needed to advance to the next step and actually start writing my own code. At about the same time a friend expressed an interest starting her own Blog and asked me if I could help. Knowing little or nothing about Blogging, and being a typical man, I answered, “Of course I can setup a Blog for you. It’s a piece of cake.”
The intent of this Blog is to tell you about my experiences as I delve further into Visual Studio 2008 Express (free from Microsoft) and Blogging, using WordPress (free from WordPress.org). Since a lot of what I’ll be commenting on here will come for dealing with my friend Vienna you might want to visit her new Blog ViennasView.com.
So, if this sounds interesting to you, tag along for my triumphs and frustrations.
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