Another Evening’s Ramble
Mar 5th, 2007 by Kirk M
Many thoughts have abounded in my rather spacious skull of late. The latest being the coaching of a blogging friend of mine who had just gone over to “hosting her own” WP blog and is at the very beginnings of learning how to take proper care of her new pet just like I did a few months ago. So far she’s learning faster than I did when I started. But as I’m showing her the ropes now, so I had someone else (Hi Becky) show me the ropes back then along with my honey who gave me one of her sub-domains of her website (which she built and maintains herself) to put my blog on and helped me with all my questions concerning html code and syntax type of stuff. All this brought one of those rambling thoughts to mind—writing up a set of pages titled something like “Wordpress for the absolute beginner series” or “Proper care and feeding of your new obsession”.
Well, maybe not the latter one.
Suffice it to say that anyone thinking of heading in to the marvelous world of doing it yourself with Wordpress needs to know that there are certain items that you just have to have. I don’t mean getting into all the technical, SEO, PHP 4 or 5, plugin/theme hacks, sand-boxing joyrides or any of the other 33,476 things you can do to your poor WP blog. That’s why there are wonderful people like Lorelle of Lorelle on Wordpress and many others with all sorts of good info for folks who have already gotten past the stage of “OMG! What have I done???“. Just basic tools of the trade if you will. The tools one must have at the very beginning all installed on your PC and ready to go before the new adventurer in Wordpress-ing has done more than thought about what domain name they would like to have.
In my long past I spent a good many years as a certified Naval instructor at the New London Submarine base in Groton, CT and I also spent a good number of years doing tech writing among other responsibilities in my past career so the last few days coaching this lady by email has renewed my faith a bit that I still have the ability to teach and write well enough for someone to not only understand what I’m trying to get across but successfully applying it as well. I’m not as good as I used to be of course. There’s a big difference between being young and sharp and…uh…well…about 25 years older or so….if you know what I mean.
So perhaps I’ll start the first of those pages someday real soon. It’s not like I have a deadline or anything of that nature to contend with and with the advent of the Wordpress 2.1.x series, I can now save pages as drafts. Like an omen it is.
Now I’m not going to put the link to my friend’s new blog up yet, she’d probably send me an email bomb or something similarly awful if I did so until she at least has her blog’s layout the way she wants it and more than one post put up, I’ll wait for her permission first and then I’ll let everyone know where she is. In the meantime…I’ll think about those pages.
“Wordpress for the absolute beginner”, brilliant! Actually Kirk this is a good idea and you would be very good at it! You write well, your instructions are easy to follow as long as one does not jump ahead. Guess we all have a tendency to do that though huh?
Yeah no need to give out the address yet, still not much there and I have a lot going on this week. But there is so much I want to do with it. Did I ever tell ya patience is not my best virtue lol.
Yes, jumping is one of my best qualities. It’s the landing that’s getting harder to take these days.
It’s taken a very looonnnngg time to finally learn that I shouldn’t waste any more time learning how to be patient.
Something like that anyway. You’re site’s coming along great. And I see you didn’t include your new blog’s url when you made this comment either. Smart and impatient. Quite a combination there Elaine.
That is the beauty of knowledge - learn something, pass it on to someone else
@Elaine:
Thank you for the compliment and no….I had never noticed that at all
@Becky:
That’s the only way to live! And thank you for all the help you’ve given me.