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Hooray! Today is the day that the blog design is really done and I
can stop messing with it for awhile. Most issues have been resolved and
I’m finally very happy with the way this thingie both works and looks -
even more so because I did it myself, and that’s a fun feeling. I spent
a lot of money this summer on things I couldn’t afford, meaning a
professional blog design got cut off the list. I was kind of jealous of
the people who had such pretty pages on their own domain names and blog
lust kicked in.
But self, I said, can’t YOU just do it? Come on, you
had your first webpage on GeoCities and you were messing with basic
html when you were 14. You at least knew how to work with if not write
javascripts a year later. You can speak binary. Heck, you’re one of the
17 people in the world who remembers what a BBS is because you actually
used one. And you have impeccable design skills, really. You can read a
book about how to do this and the Intertubes will tremble.
And really? It’s not that hard!
I read “Wordpress for Dummies” and dedicated a lonely Saturday night to a date with my shiny new laptop. I signed up for a domain name and basic hosting with Tigertech.net and
thank you baby Jesus, they pretty much dummy-proofed the startup
process for me. Everything in the Dummies book correlated nicely with
the way Tigertech has their user page set up. I knew exactly where to
go to do my PHP thing and my MySQL thing and all the other
thingy-things. Don’t ask me what those are, I just did them AND I
DIDN’T HAVE TO KNOW WHAT THEY ARE TO DO IT.
The Dummies book recommended several FTP programs (file transfer
protocol, I knew that one! It moves files from your hard drive to your
host server). I chose one called FileZilla. Since the book and my server were so helpful, it was really easy to get my FTP set up.
I installed the Wordpress.org
design and editing software because it runs like good old Wordpress.com
and has so many built-in options for customization. They advertise a
5-minute install for the software and the kids are not lying. Simple.
If you’ve used Wordpress.com, you’ll love how similar it is to what
you’re used to. And if you’ve used Blogger (and I have, so I can say
this), you will worship its superiority.
But then came the scariest step. I had to move the blog. All the
content, all my writing, the good, bad and ugly of three years just HAD
to make it with me in the transfer. I was scared. I ate a peanut butter
cup to calm down. The Dummies book spelled it all out for me though,
how to export from Wordpress.com and import to Wordpress.org. The book
also includes instructions on how to move blogs from Blogger, TypePad,
Movable Type, and I think a few others. It worked! My posts, my
categories, my pictures, my blogroll, everything imported. Not all
platforms will import EVERYTHING, categories and whatnot, but the book
explains it further,
CAVEAT: Four posts randomly went missing, and I
only noticed because my post count at the old host was 4 more than my
post count after the import. Check this before you delete anything from
your old blog! Since my old blog still existed, I just copied and
pasted the text and entered the correct publishing date and those posts
are online with the new blog now. A small pain, but easy enough to fix.
Now the fun part! Aesthetics!
Wordpress.org starts off your blog, even if you’ve imported it, with
its own very basic theme, and you get to take it from there. There are
gajillions of free themes on themes.wordpress.net, and most of them come with nice instructions about how to upload them via FTP. The Dummies book has info on this too.
I wanted SGB to look unique but I didn’t want to dive into a lot of
code to do it. The Dummies book has information about CSS and whatnot,
but I was still sweating peanut butter from the blog transfer so I
looked for a free theme with opportunity to customize. There were so
many! This theme you see here is called Mandigo,
and it is by far my favorite of all the themes I looked at and/or tried
before settling. You can customize easily with a theme options tool
that is built right in - colors, header, columns (how many, where
placed), widgets, plugins, all sorts of little stuff that you’d have to
change in the code of many other themes. No need for code here - just
fill in the
