Learning Curve

Oh the things I’ve learned by moving my blog to my own site. I’ve had to learn about shared hosting services, how to manage them, and managing my own blog. In the process I’m learning about HTML, PHP, and CSS. I’ve had to learn how to manipulate automatically generated code from AdSense, remember how to use FTP, and remember that not everyone uses Internet Explorer. 

I know you can’t tell by simply look at my blog right now, but I fixed a few problems today. For example, if you were to scroll to the bottom of the page and look at my Wicked Lasers ad, you’d probably laugh to find out it took me an hour to align the ad so it would run all the way across the entire length of the rest of the blog. I was trying to adjust the code provided by Wicked Lasers; I was modifying the pixel numbers. Later in my research, I discovered I could simply use width=100% vice a pixel number.

You probably won’t care, either, at the amount of effort it took me to figure out how to get the blogroll at the bottom to appear correctly. If you would have seen the site yesterday, the blogroll had multiple lines per entry, one of the lines containing a ‘link rating.’ I wanted to get rid of the rating but didn’t know how for the longest time. I used Google to find out the syntax of the get_link function and was able to edit accordingly. 

And finally, I was able to add advertisements on the right-hand sidebar, and the Google search bar in the upper-right corner is customized for my webiste, but will allow users to search the entire Internet. All of that took me about 4 hours, plus the 8 I spent on initial setup last night, and I’m still no where near where I want to be.

At the same time, I haven’t been this excited and buried in a project in a long time. I had a lot of fun hunched over my desk looking up the different pieces of code; I’ve been learning from the different WordPress forums; I have even contributed a few answers to some of the questions submitted by other newbies. I get so wrapped up and involved that, last night, my stomach literally had to start convulsing before I realized I had better eat. Today when I arrived home from work, I was so excited to get to the computer and start work. But, I forced myself to make two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and wash it down with a Mountain Dew.

Anyhow, I just thought I’d share. This might be an entry only another blogger, programmer, or other ‘coding’ individual could understand. The point is, I know there are other geeks out there that get the same way when they start working on a project.