Sunday Night Success

Wordpress 2.6.3 versus 2.7.1

One of the limitations of the becomeablogger.com tutorials is that they are working with wordpress 2.6.3 while the current version is 2.7.1. In the tutorials they ask that you install the older version so that everything they instruct you on in the videos will match what is on your screen; good advice for the most part. However, as I was working on the blog there was message in the admin dashboard that told me to update to 2.7.1. I couldn’t help but wonder if I was going to mess something up if I stuck to using 2.6.3 so I decided to upgrade and…..

Disaster!

I am not completely clear, technically, on what I messed up while trying to upgrade, but, irregardless of what I did, I broke the blog. After doing some research to try and fix the problem I ended up starting over, at that point it just seemed simpler.

Starting over

I was surprised how quickly I managed to start over and get back to where I was with the blog when I messed things up. I deleted all of the wordpress files from my site (easier to do because I had no content or customizations to try and save), deleted the mySQL database from my cPanel and started the whole process over. Once again the becomeablogger.com videos helped me quickly get through the process and in no time I was up and running with wordpress 2.7.1.

The day comes to an end

The near disaster of destroying all of my hard work showed me that six hours was enough for my Blog Action Day so I am now packing it in. Looking back on my original goals for the day I have fallen short, but, I have never built a blog from scratch before so I really didn’t have a clue how long each step was going to take. Overall I feel a strong sense of success with the whole process.

Days to come

I am going to slow down the process a bit now and work on finishing off “Sunday Night Success” over the next two weeks and get it tweaked to the point that I am happy with it. I have plugins to add, widgets to install, and content to post. The blog is live, which was my goal, and now it is ready to grow. I am excited to see where “Sunday Night Success” takes me in the days to come.

Spinning my wheels

I spent this hour looking at theme after theme until I finally decided that I needed to put a stop to the process, pick a handful of themes and test them out. Once I had selected a small number of themes (8) I discovered how easy it was going to be to test each of them. The wordpress admin dashboard allows you to upload all of the themes that you want and then test each of them with a simple click of the button. With my list of theme goals in hand it was time to pick a theme for Sunday Night Success.

The winner is……

In the end I picked a theme by Andrea Mignolo named “Oulipo”. A quick rundown of my goals list, I think, shows that the theme meets my various goals:

1.    Simple: The theme has tons of white space and nothing to distract the readers view from the content, exactly what I was after.
2.    Minimal colour: The theme also fits this requirement with only two colours: black and orange.
3.    Widget ready: Oulipo has a widget ready sidebar. I am new enough to blogging that I am not sure if I wanted the entire theme to be widget ready or if the sidebar is enough, I guess time will tell.
4.    Twitter: there is no mention of whether twitter will work on the theme. However, I have found widgets that put twitter on your blog so I am hoping the sidebar will allow me to use one of these widgets.
5.    SEO optimization: no mention about this one, but I like certain aspects of the style enough that I am willing to look past this goal.
6.    Larger fonts: this required a bit of change on my part as, at first, the fonts were very small. I managed to do some searching and figure out how to increase the font size, so, I am happy with the fonts now and I am hoping the change I made to the style sheet does not break something else down the road.
7.    Frame: although I was originally looking for a coloured frame to surround the central blog I ended up falling in love with the non-moving column on the left side of Oulipo that contains the blog title and tag line instead of putting the title and tag line at the top of the blog. I may end up trying to change the colour on the background of this column, but I currently have no idea how to accomplish this.

The winner for now

I am not completely happy with the Oulipo theme and I may end up trying to create my own theme as I have recently found some tools in my research that could make theme creation possible without having to learn how to code. For now I am happy with the look of the blog and I don’t want to fall into the trap of overanalyzing the situation and becoming paralyzed.

Check out hour six and the end.

So many themes, so little time

I started investigating themes, and was overwhelmed with the shear number of wordpress themes that are available. I started moving through the list of themes at themes.wordpress.net and writing down names of themes that interested me. Unfortunately, this method was resulting in a shorter list than the 650 on the site, but a list that was still going to be too long to be functional.

Theme Goals

Funny that I am making a blog about goal setting and success, but started my search for themes without defining what I actually want. So, I put a stop to my random theme search and decided I should write down a list of items I want in a theme that will give my sight the look I am after. Here is the list:

1.    Simple: I want the content to be the feature and draw people’s interest so I don’t want to make a blog site that is too busy.
2.    Minimal colour: related to number one I don’t want a great deal of colour, preferably white and one other colour would be perfect. I am also all right with that one colour being a black or a grey.
3.    Widget ready: I do not know a great deal about blog technology so I would prefer something that is widget ready for a few of the most useful widgets that I may want to use.
4.    Twitter: whatever theme I use it needs to be able to easily put my twitter feed into the blog.
5.    SEO optimization: this would be nice although if a theme gave me the image I wanted I could work around this or learn how to do it myself.
6.    Larger fonts: I hate reading small fonts on websites so I would like the theme to use larger fonts, and a font that is crisp and simple, nothing fancy.
7.    Frame: I am not sure what to call this but I enjoy blogs that have the blog in the center with some sort of image or colour framing it in so that the blog doesn’t fill the browser window.

In the end

It will be interesting to see if I can find a premade theme that meets all of these goals or if my desire to have exactly what I want will require me to try and make my own theme or, at the very least, heavily edit a current theme.

Check out hour five.

Technical nightmare made easy

Installing the wordpress.org software was easy; everything went nice and smooth. Of course, without the video tutorial at becomeablogger.com I would have been in deep trouble.

I have no background in creating “my SQL” databases, FTP uploading, or web site software installation. Fortunately the video tutorials talked me through each process one step at a time. It took awhile, but it would have taken far longer if I had of been searching through help documents or trying to find answers on websites. Overall the process took about an hour and a half, and that is without having any idea about how to do it.

Next Step

Now I have everything set up and a quick visit to my website now displays the default wordpress theme, ready for me to start altering, and adding to. Next on the list is to figure out the functions of the dashboard and to find a different theme.

Check out hour four.

In the first hour I managed to get through the first two videos on the becomeablogger.com website. Although I had watched these videos previously, as they gave me the idea for my action day, I wanted to re-watch them in case there was any useful information I may have forgotten.

Starting with the basics

Becomeablogger.com starts with the very basics: choosing a blog platform, choosing a domain name, and finding a web host. I had actually gone through these steps earlier in the week in preparation for the Blog Action Day, but if you are starting from scratch the step-by-step information in the videos is priceless and will get you started no matter your level of computer literacy. By the end of the first three videos you will be ready to start creating your blog.

Breaking my first rule

I had planned to follow the instructions on becomeablogger.com exactly to see how it all turned out. However, I managed to break a rule pretty early in the process when it was time to choose a domain name. Becomeablogger.com recommends a three step process:

1.    Use a keyword search tool. No rule broken here, I used the suggested tool and did a search for a few of the keywords I thought might be helpful. Considering I am creating a blog about success my main word for the search was, not surprisingly: “success”.
2.    Brainstorm all possible names. First rule broken. The videos suggest brainstorming at least 10 domain names for your blog. I managed to get to two domain names: www.successpartner.com and www.sundaynightsuccess.com. I chose the second. Why? See the next step.
3.    Decide on the best possible domain name. Considering the idea for the blog came from the success group I belong to, and the fact that we meet on Sunday nights, the name just felt right. It included one of the keywords I had researched, but, more importantly, the name represented the concept of the blog perfectly. My success group meets once a week to work together so we can achieve all of our goals. I want my blog to help others undergo the same process, so, a perfect match.

Next steps

Will my name decision end up being the right choice? Only time will tell but, first I actually need to create the blog, and that will be the focus of the next hour of Blog Action Day.

Check out hours two and three.

If there is anyone interested in joining me in creating your blog I will be starting at 9:00AM tomorrow morning, Saturday March 14th (Pacific Standard Time). I will be on twitter for the whole process at:

http://twitter.com/JeremieMiller

If you choose to join me, good luck with your blog!