Learning to Blog

I thought blogging would be easy, but it’s harder than I thought. Oh not the writing — that part is easy. It’s the darned software that’s the problem; it keeps eating my posts. I checked with other authors online and pretty much everyone recommended the same software–wordpress. If I had a user manual, or had read the documentation it might be easier. This software is supposed to be the best (free) software out there, and I AM a computing professional and skilled webmaster. I figured it would be a test of how good their user interface is. Not as good as I’d hoped. 

When I first tried downloading from the WordPress website, the files wouldn’t even open. But then I found that my webhosting service, HostCentric, offers wordpress as a simpleinstall option. That way of downloading was MUCH easier. It did all the setup directly into my website.  However, the “put your blog in a different folder than the software” option didn’t work. I finally figured that out and disabled the feature — voila! my posts reappeared.

I’d really like to work on uploading some graphics to pretty it up, but first I need to get the navigation menu set up to my liking. I finally switched to a different theme that offers a bit more flexibility with the page appearance. I haven’t figured out how to make text wrap around images in the posts, or how to put working links in a post yet. So far I can only put links on the navbar. Wish me luck, and bear with me on these first few posts as I shake the kinks out of the system.