So like any good blossoming geek, I have started a few blogs. I have my art blog which at the moment has sort of been on the back burner until I start doing more art. I have this blog which is supposed to be my personal catch all subjects kind of blog, and then I have the Mixed Student Resources site, which is sort of a hybrid (excuse the pun) blog in the sense that it really is more of a web site that I am building using WordPress. I had originally downloaded an HTML template from the Open Source Web Design site which I really liked. The color was great and it used CSS which I have come to find is REALLY helpful. Before CSS if I wanted to make a site wide change I had to go to each page and if you have a lot of pages, well there goes your Friday night. Who am I kidding, if you are doing that for fun you probably didn’t have much of a Friday night planned.

Anyway, this template was really great. But then I discovered the magic of WordPress. WordPress is an open source blogging tool. If you don’t already have a domain and hosting you can get a free account from them which looks like www.yourdomain.wordpress.com. They have lots of different templates you can choose from and you have some degree of flexibility in how you set it up. However I already had a domain (several in fact) so I was able to install the software and use it as part of my site without the wordpress.com at the end. For those who are able, this option offers all the freedom and flexibility you could want.

So why did I want to use WordPress when I already had a great HTML template? The first reason I wanted to use it was because it would make the site dynamic. I wanted to make the site searchable, and flexible. With WordPress, your blog posts are stored in a database where they live apart from the formating. For me this means that changing the formating of my site would be much easier because it would not involve touching the articles I planned to be writing. Also when writing a post, WordPress has a web interface so writing a post does not mean that you are tied to a specific computer or have a specific program on the computer. (I could even login from my phone if I needed to and write a post – yes I am that big of a geek).

The second reason I really liked WordPress was its ability to be searchable. The Mixed Student Resources site is one that I hope will grow to include a lot of posts about different resources so having the ability to offer people a search field was huge. Related to that is the ability to tag a post as belonging to various catagories. This allows me to offer different ways for people to browse through information.

So the functionality of WordPress was perfect, and the look of the original HTML template was perfect, my only problem was how to marry the two. I started by finding a template that was very similar in the basic structure to what i already had. My idea was to change out the style sheets (the file that the pages look to for formatting information) and then just need to make minor changes. To some extent it worked. I have had to change alot of the information on the pages that people view to be more in line with the style sheet and I have customized pretty much all of the pages to work the way I need them to (which has been very fun to do). Over all it has been a good experience.

So now I am almost ready to roll out the completed site. But of course there is always a hitch. The thing is, that when I look at the interweb, I use Firefox. I have lots of fun extentions, I have fun themes, its all very functional. However, I forgot that when designing web stuff IE and Firefox do not always see things eye to eye. So i got my site looking good, acting almost right, and I looked at in IE and it was all out of wack. In the end it was something simple. It was a tag in the some of the page templates that I had created.  I deleted it and it all went back to looking good. And now actually it works the way it should completely in IE, and has a glitch in Firefox.

I have had a really good time (yes a nerd I am) doing this site and working with WordPress.

Love it!