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First Post – Blog is Live!

The site is up!

Oh, hello there. Thanks for stumbling across my first post. If you haven’t already checked out the “What is this site?” page, I’ll give you a sec to read that over.

For those that have read that, welcome! The WordPress site is officially live. As this is a blog about learning, we’ll make this first one about learning about blogs.

Where to start?

This is the question I started with around 80 minutes ago. I didn’t know what sites were blogging today, if free resources are available, or any of the other relevant details. I started by doing what every good programmer does – I Googled the problem.

I came across various online rankings, but settled on Forbes. With the pros and cons laid out, I needed to organize my thoughts on what my needs were and how to meet them.

  • I needed (wanted) a site that is easy to use from the start
  • I wanted the option to shift to a custom domain in the future
  • I wanted themes prepopulated (way too many design decisions to consider that from my own creative ability)
  • I wanted something free to start with features available later (with a cost, of course)

Keeping all of these in mind, I created my WordPress.com account. I used my personal email to start, but later realized that I want this effort to be larger than that. So, as I was creating my home page, I:

  • Created a new Google account for use here
  • Created and slightly customized a YouTube channel using that brand-new Google account so I have somewhere to host video content (for free)
  • Snagged a few URLs into NotePad for ease of use when adding Social Buttons on the WordPress site (Gmail, GitHub, LinkedIn, YouTube)

Prep Work is done. Now what?

Not having made (dragged-and-dropped) a website since the webs.com days, I started tweaking the theme to be “pale cyan blue” rather than the teal you see now. However, effectively remapping the background color of an existing theme didn’t seem as straightforward as one might think, so I ultimately reverted to the theme’s default color.

With that basic selection out of the way, I started working down a linear list of things I needed:

  • I created a home page
  • I created a page describing the site (What is this site?)
  • I went back and linked this on the home page
  • I created a place to host all the blog posts
  • I went back and linked this on the home page
  • I spent some time adding a footer on the home page
  • I launched the site from the WordPress Dashboard
  • I didn’t realize this was something you had to do in the beginning (had I read the tutorials, I may have known that sooner)
  • I created a Contact page
  • You guessed it, I went back and linked this on the home page
  • I made a Coming Soon page (nothing planned for this spot, I just wanted to fill that button on the home page)
  • I started on this blog post

What’s next?

At the moment, I don’t have any additional major edits planned for the site. My next blog post, I’m thinking of doing a demo of how to set up a virtual environment (with guides for Windows as well as MacOS). While I’ve done it several times on each Operating System, I always have to Google it. At least by writing it down in a post, I (and possibly you, the reader) will have a single place to go when it’s time to spin one up.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post. Until the next time we learn something together, have a wonderful Saturday!