The Making of My Blog – Part 3

It was just after returning home after our trip to France last fall when I first started to put together the details of how I was going to build this new site. I had looked at a couple of different programs that fell into the category of “Blog software” and finally settled on this one which is called Word Press. While I work in the Information Technology (IT) field, programming is not really my background and I wanted to be able to customize my blog site without having to learn a lot of programming. I’ve pretty much given up on that illusion as in only the last month alone, I’ve spent about $75 on programming books and I’ve found it necessary to start learning things like the PHP scripting language and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in order to do any real customization of how my site will look to the viewing public. While on the surface it all sounds very boring about having to learn all of these things, I have developed an appreciation for learning how the web technologies work under the covers and with every new change I make it’s instantly seen in my web browser. Instant gratification!

My only hope is that I don’t totally screw things up and have to try spend tons of time trying to fix things. The one thing that I have been doing religiously is making backups of my site so that in the event of a major problem, I should be OK being able to restore it back to normal.

I remember about a month ago when I had reached a milestone in my web site customization that I said to myself that it was “finally” finished and now I would spend all of my effort just writing new articles. Since then, I’ve probably made another 50 changes to the site so another illusion of web maintenance is behind me in that I now accept that the site will just continue to get modified and improved.

One of the major tasks that I’m doing right now is attempting to convert all of my existing web pages that are liked off the main site to be given a consistent look and feel. The style that I’ve given is a the standard “Excellent Adventure” yellow (also known as colour #FFFFCC) with the green stripe down the right side (see About Me for an example of this). Manually changing all of my pages to this style is made easier by using CSS but it’s still very much a manual process. Once It’s all done, it will be much easier to make new pages but converting what I have now is a real pain.

Just one more step on the road to web site nirvana.

Baden