I’ve decided that my new hobby will be making a website for this blog. I’ve purchased a domain name (to be announced when there’s something there to look at) and site hosting, now I just have to figure out how the hell to make something of the space. (Special thanks to my pal the Curmudgeony Librarian for letting me know I should pay extra for private site registration.) I’m quite the newbie when it comes to web design. Many moons ago, my first blog was a site I coded myself. Er, well, when I say coded myself I mean I stole the code from a friend’s blog and modified it using what I learned from a book called something like “Teach Yourself HTML 4 in 24 Hours.” Yes, this was back in the wild days before blogger and other convenient blog programs. (Or if they existed I didn’t know it.) I didn’t know the term blog, in fact, it was just my “online journal.” Not very exciting stuff as I blogged under my own name. The site was pretty basic. Each entry had to be a new page I created and manually linked to the page before.
I’ve bounced around blogging platforms a little and I like Blogger best for the ease of use, even if it is now owned by evil Google who stores all your information indefinitely. (I find LiveJournal to be hopelessly complicated. Vox was ok but who the hell uses it? I forget the rest I’ve tried.) But now I’ve decided to make life difficult for myself. *chuckle* I’ve downloaded two things that might help me - Movable Type (if I can figure out how to install it) and Nvu (an open source WYSIWYG editor I have yet to figure out how to use). I’ve got a 30 day trial of Photoshop Elements to do the graphics on (so far the most fun part and the part I know the most about doing!). This will certainly be a little adventure. I’ll post developments here when there are any. My web host provides a site editing program but none of the templates are really satisfactory.
Anyway, I’m going to go enjoy my once-a-week-masturbation-without-permission session and then get to work installing Movable Type to see what it can do. Wish me luck! Any web geeks out there willing to give me advice when I need it? (Curmudgeony and D.S. are good for that.)
The general consensus is that Movable Type is just a very weak Wordpress wannabe. Most webhost services will have Fantastico in your CPanel which will install Wordpress for you. It’s extremely user friendly and very easy to customize. More simply, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it.
Thanks Anon. I actually gave up on movable type last night and looked up wordpress. There’s a program where some computer geek will install wordpress for free, and I took advantage of that. I just need to get my provider to turn on PHP and I can get started. Whoo hoo!