Posts Tagged ‘wordpress themes’

Don’t stub your toe.

Saturday, July 10th, 2010

When I was younger, there was nothing I liked better than rearranging the furniture in my bedroom. I’d go upstairs, ostensibly “to bed,” and I would push-pull-lift-and otherwise maneuver the furniture in my room until the room didn’t resemble itself. This behavior continued through college, in my room in the House of Y (ah, the House of Y. A post for another day.)

So, yes, I’ve done it again. Sorry. I chose another theme, and have wasted, er, spent, several hours this late afternoon reformatting and updating to this theme –Twenty Ten from the fine folks at WordPress. Why did I switch? Well, aside from the novelty of moving the furniture around, so to speak, I felt compelled to change when I was surfing my own site and noticed some things that had me scratching my head. And then wailing silently in that same head when I had to admit I don’t know enough code to figure out how to change these “things.”

After completing the switch out of wordpress.com  to another host in the past several months, I continue to learn more and more about this medium — about this mysterious “code”, about themes and widgets, about plugins….I’m doing a lot of learning. And just when I think I’m getting it, something happens and I know I don’t have it. So the lesson that I inadvertently learned today was that the theme’s designer can, apparently, put buttons on the my site that link to things that s/he thinks are important. Now, I totally understand, and support, a designer’s right to have his/her name on my site — s/he’s the designer, after all, and generously put the theme out there (for free!). I have no problem with that sort of self-promotion. What I do object to is that the designer apparently put buttons down in my site’s footer that sent you — when you clicked — to a magazine website and also to the designer’s website. For some reason, I never noticed these buttons until today — which leads me to believe that they are relatively new — because long before today I had been dwelling on the footer (I had been trying to crack the code that would allow me to modify it but I surrendered to the mystery that is the editing box for the theme).

I have signed myself up for Bloggy Boot Camp in Philadelphia in September, and I’ve been lurking a bit on the SITS Girls site. I’m realizing I have so much to learn, and it seems like it’s an enormous task to learn even a fraction of it. While I have no delusions of grandeur — I don’t aspire to make money off this site (it’d be a nice bonus, but it is not my intention) — I would like to have a blog that I can be proud of, that makes me think, that spurs others to think and leads them to other interesting sites authored by other wise and interesting people. I feel like the folks over at SITS can really help me create that space.

For the time being, I’m taking baby steps. So far, I’ve moved my own site (yay me!), crashed it (boo!), got it back up (yay!), got hacked (double boo!) and recovered from that. Along the way, I’m learning a helluva lot — about blogging, about code, about hosting sites, evil hackers, and how good people inherently are.

Baby steps, friends.
Just don’t stub your toes while I’m rearranging the furniture.

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