Posted by Raul on February 8, 2010
It is amazing how “Dumb Person Friendly” is the version 2.9.1 of WP.
After upgrading I spent lots of time adding plugins like a madman (it is fun!). The ventilation fan in my laptop was screaming: “stop it you bastard!”
Since many plugins can be installed just clicking “Install” I tried several just to see what they can do; of course not all of them worked and some even fooled around with the pages moving things as they pleased, so I had to deactivate and delete the big majority of them.
Others had to be installed using Filezilla, so I kept uploading more to the plugging folder. At some point, when opening Filezilla for the “n” time I swear there was a message saying:
“You again?”
“C’mon be nice and upload this one for me, please?”
Still many had to be completed by adding html text in the header.php, sidebar.php, etc, so I spent lots of time with the “Copy and Paste”; update; checking the site to see what happened; going back to change the position of the added script; updating; back to see what happened again, etc.
Throughout this experimentation I learned some basics about the strange language of html ( <p>; </p>; </div>; <h2>; </h2> ), so now the need arises to investigate more about these curious coding systems (html, css, php, etc.)
Definitely Barbara’s idea (Blogging Without A Blog) of using a Test Site is a must. The first four days it was just trying things in this site so to learn how the whole system works, at least enough to know what to do, then on Friday came the time to implement everything in the real blog and it definitely went a lot smoother thanks to the previous experimentation.
So I changed the green color of the header with a picture; used the publicity space in the sidebars for pictures and text; added 400 pluggins (I already told you), etc, and all with a cost of zero dollars using a free Theme and plugins, half a bottle of Aleve for headaches and six gallons of coffee.
It is somehow funny that the Theme that best suited my preferences is called “Bible Scholar” considering that I use it for an “Alien Ghost” blog (Amen!)
Even though the process of updating is completed I still need to keep tinkering with a couple of things here and there, but now I could tell new bloggers:
“I remember the times when we had to upload plugins manually”
“Yes grandpa, you already told us”
So my hopes are that now this blog becomes less “hacker friendly” and more interactive, where people can be “seen” if they take the time to contribute a comment.
It is funny when you think that the mysteries of the universe (or at least the mysteries of computers) little by little and with lots of work can be slowly being deciphered and understood if you are willing to take the challenge and the work that implies to learn them, even if it is the basics.
“Not having enough money to outsource everything is a wonderful thing”
Raul
Posted by Raul on January 29, 2010
The time has come for me to do some upgrading to this blog.
I want to add several elements like gravatars and CommentLuv in the comment section; a list of the people commenting at the right hand of the page, etc, but it seems that the WP version I’m using is too old and tired for that (2.6.1) and also the Theme seems to be too simple for such luxuries, so I’ll be following Barbara’s advice (from http://bloggingwithoutablog.com) and create a test site to experiment for a couple of days before getting into the updating process.
Hopefully, starting this Monday, February 01 and to Friday 05, the whole process would be completed, so there’ll be no posting for that week to dedicate all the time to deal with this infernal computer technology.
Think of it as if, for those of you that don’t have a clue about cars, are going to rebuild the engine with just a bunch of hand tools, no knowledge and/or experience, and using information obtained from Google…there’s going to be bleeding hands and tears!
Fortunately, since this process is about typing and clicking, I doubt there’ll be any bleeding at all, but I’m not so sure about the tears!
So wish me luck and we’ll see what happens, and if you have any advice about this process, it’ll be much appreciated.
Raul
Posted by Raul on November 18, 2009
Definitely computer technology is not my strongest point! It’s been several weeks of work just to get this blog up and running mostly because of the different aspects to deal with.
It is about finding the theme that applies better to what I want to show and the way I want to show it so it’ll reflect not only the content but also the “personality”
Also is about tinkering with little details like implementing a contact form for people to send me emails; I know it is just a pluggin that it is pretty much straight forward to install, but when you have no clue on what you are doing (like me) then a thousand mistakes can and will happen along the process, many times forcing you to delete everything and start all over again!
Then it is about implementing the different pages and their content, the kind and size of letter and the color you want to use, and every time something is changed, everything changes in the page and I can here myself saying “What?? How did that happened!?”
For many of you out there, especially young people, probably all of this stuff is really simple and straight forward, but for someone like me that got into a computer just a couple of years ago, and spent most of that time using the computer just to read emails and keep the family pictures, everything about starting a blog is new and sort of a giant task.
Talking about technology, I wrote all my notes, observations and short tales in Spanish from previous years in my computer so to keep them in a more manageable way and discarded the paper to save room; and to make sure everything was safe I made a copy in an external hard drive just in case, but some time ago my laptop crashed and required a change of hard drive, so all the writings there were lost.
No problem, I have a copy in that external hard drive!
After the laptop was repaired and running again I went to plug the external hard drive to copy all the writings back to my laptop and guess what, it didn’t turn on!
I tried the external hard drive in my son’s computer and nope, nothing happened… the external hard drive is crashed too!
So more than twenty years of writings; about 20 Gigabytes of words were lost in time and space!
I was depressed for about a week!
Well…I guess it can be taken as a motivation to learn this computer technology a little more…and have 10 external hard drives just in case!
Anyway, since the tinkering with the blog is mostly done, the time has come to start pouring some content so I hope you’ll enjoy what I’ll be posting the next couple of days.
Raul
