Get Your Blog Up And Running

Well, things have progressed to the point where BlogOnSC! is up and running.... sort of.
I've gotten Wordpress functional, semi-finished building a template and some structure and have posted a few posts. There is much to be done and I am trying to rapidly aquire the knowledge to do it without paying someone the big bucks.

Using WordPress as a CMS is giving me some real glitches. There are a lot of questions for which the answers seem vague and unpromising but I'll keep looking and trying things. I believe if you want to do it all yourself, learning xhtml, css, ajax, php, javascript and others is pretty crucial. I think I'm on stage 1 at best so far but am trying my best to get the basics down pat. Ultimately with the idea in mind of having a website that functions as if it were built by the pros and makes a good e-commerce plateform/blogging site. That's a long way down the road.

One thing I have learned, there are enough free resources out there that for anyone wanting to make a blogging site, or a simple GP site, you can easily do it for free. All the graphics I am using, or will use, are created with GIMP, the code editing is done in HTML-Kit, available at Download.com and of course WordPress is available free of charge along with the host of information and forums available to help you figure it out. The only expenditure to date, is a book I picked up on CSS, XHTML and AJAX as I am still more "old school" when it comes to information and like to highlight text and important items rather than having it on my computer. It's easy to sit in a chair and read through things, highlighting as you go then get on the computer and try them out at a convenient time. So total cost to date, $30.00 for the book. If it really helps, I'll give it a plug here and on my site

So far the only posts I've put up are a couple of humor posts about being a stay at home dad and one political post about South Carolina Governor, Mark Sanford and the bailout money. I guess it's time to really start blogging and trying to get traffic.

Next up, I'm going to post a list of all the resources I used to get things going, the trials and failures and (minor to date) successes I've had.

See you soon.