A few people have enquired about the progress of my new blog, so I thought I would give a quick report.

I had some problems with the initial WordPress install and a bunch of 500 errors. My host has been really fantastic though, and fixed them quickly for me.

Back in May I had a crash course in WordPress when I created my (now abandoned) guild website. It wasn’t too difficult. I used to dabble in web design, but that was about a decade ago, and I never sat down and learned any of this new-fangled CSS stuff. Steep learning curve.

No matter. I might not know a single thing about CSS, but I’m pretty darn good at opening up a template file, reading through it for something that vaguely resembles the part that I want to change, fiddling with the settings, saving, and then checking to see if that changed what I wanted. In fact, I’m a champion at this. I am a VERY stubborn person, and I won’t walk away until the template is doing what I want it to do. I’ve been able to stumble through and get it to look how I want – I’m quite proud.

The original template author would probably cry if she saw it, though.

You should feel for my friends too, it’s been a rollercoaster ride with me alternating between “!@%$@%!### I HATE THIS THING ITS BROKEN I CAN’T MAKE ANYTHING WORK WHY WON’T IT WORK THIS IS RIDICULOUS” and (2 minutes later) “I am amazing. I’m so thrilled with how this is looking.”

They must be so tired :P





Anyway – here’s the deal:

- domain and space acquired (stop trying to peek!)
- WordPress installed
- theme butchered to my liking
- plugins added: contact form, related articles, etc
- lots of stupid test posts made


To do:

- put the static pages together (About, Blogroll, etc)
- transfer old content over (?)
- test that everything works
- put stuff in the sidebar
- little stuff like a favicon, wowhead links, etc
- ??
- profit


I’m not sure about bringing the old content over, or whether I should just start again (I would bring over particular guides etc, however).

Obviously, bringing it over means people will be able to search the older content.. but I worry that it’s going to be a pain in the butt to do. WordPress has that annoying problem where it strips out your superfluous p and br tags, meaning that you have no extra line breaks between your paragraphs. I use those a lot.

150+ posts, no paragraph spacing.

On one hand, having ALL of my content on the new site is logical – all in the one place, for people to search. On the other hand, do I want 150 posts that look like ass? Is it better to have an archive of all the posts, and have them looking kinda bad.. than to just start fresh and say “go here for older posts” and point back to blogspot? I’m not sure what to do. I’m leaning towards “of course you have to import it” but ugh..

I suppose I won’t know how bad it is until I give it a try!

At any rate.. I still have quite a lot to do before the new site can go live. It is a gradual project, at the moment.

 :)





Possibly Related Posts: