Welcome to the new look of my humble little blogsite! It’s a fresh new look and looks much better than what I used to have before. I have been wanting to do this for so long but never really getting to it because other things kept coming up. But a month ago, I actually started to completely redo the website.
Before this major transition, I was using iWeb as the website publisher for making blog plots and other edits to the site. iWeb is only good if you use the built in templates that came preinstalled in the app. Starting fresh and jury rig a layout or a template within iWeb is not impossible but it is a true pain in the ass. Every time I wanted to make a post, I had to make a copy from a master “post page” and fill in a tittle, picture, context, and then shape everything into size before publishing it. Since I use both my iMac and my MacBook to write blog posts, I have to find a way to get iWeb to sync between both Macs. Thankfully DropBox did a fine job of that.
That alone was quite annoying. I suppose the final nail in the coffin for me was how Apple seems to have abandoned devolvement of iWeb in Apple’s suite of lifestyle applications known as iLife. Since then, I was looking at a replacement publishing platform that was free or small cost.
I have chosen WordPress to be that publishing platform. I have spent the last month getting to know the ins and outs of WordPress. I was set and started to re-build the website!
WordPress is really hands on! You do need to have a fair amount of understanding of web hosting servers and how they work if you want to host a WordPress site your self. You also need a good understanding of HTML and CSS if you want to create your own, or tweak layouts. Sometimes you really got to fight with WordPress to get things working. And I really mean fight with it!
For a good part of the month, I have really had a battle with WordPress to get things to work the way I want to. I have spent many hours Googleing solutions to an almost endless list of problems I had with WordPress. I even had to redesign the site twice because the first layout I had set up did not play nice with the web server. So I given up on it and went back to the drawing board to come up with the current layout you see now. Even with this current layout, I had plenty of problems! Uploading the site always came up really bad on the web server and it drove me nuts! Turns out I had the wrong upload settings on the FTP application I used.
The good news for me however is that all of that fiasco is done once, and forget. I no longer need to mess with setting up pages before publishing anything. I just write whatever the hell I want and then it’s published. It’s like a breath of fresh air.
I am really happy with the current layout. I have done quite a bit of websites through out the years and this is one of the best looking sites I stitched together. Do you remember Geocities? If your older than 20 years old, you may remember that place. Everyone had a Geocities site back in the mid 90s to early 00s. For those to young to remember, It was one of the first places on the web to have your own free website. I remember my first website was geocities.com/bad_boy2002_ad. Geocities sites pretty much looked like early websites complete with a guestbook and a counter of how many visitors visited your site. many people’s sites where lame because of the limited options in the site builder. But hey it was all in good fun! My site from what I remember was just as lame as all the others. Sadly however, Yahoo! who owned Geocities, closed down and deleted Geocities sites in 2009 because everyone moved on to social networking websites in the mid 2000′s and left there geocitie sites abandoned.
Some time around 2004, I created a website for a short lived project I did called; The JD Show. It was a site that would would be home to an internet show I wanted to create but quickly lost interest. At that time, I found a free web host and even used a free .tk domain. I think the domain was jdshow.tk. At the time, I think I used Fontpage express to publish those pages. Website from what I remember still looked like crap. Good times though!
Skip to sometime around 2009 when I created somedudeguy.com, I was getting to know the ins and outs of iWeb. Seeing how simple and straight forward the platform was, I decided to give it a try and start a blog site. But because of reasons stated above, I guess you can say that I have out grown iWeb.
So self congratulatory aside, expect the same old crap I always write! Thats right! Expect the same party pooper crap thats often pessimistic posts about topics that meets my fancy. So with that all said, Enjoy!
