The new AnotherRobot! Part 1
April 21st, 2008
It’s done, finally. From the very beginning this blog has been the bane of my existence, sucking hours upon hours of my time. Thinking about the last month and everything I endured to get it to this point, I almost never want to do it again. I say almost because I feel like it’s something I will tackle again eventually. For now though, I don’t want to even think about doing any designing, coding, and battling WordPress template tags and figuring out how the heck to style service widgets, that give almost no indication on their structure.
To begin, this wasn’t supposed to be AnotherRobot. I initially started designing this blog for my other URL, JustJason.com but realized I wanted a more interesting name and while JustJason will remain a vital part of my web presence, AnotherRobot serves me better for this blog.
The design started as a three-column design, after completely stopping development on it for a couple of months, I picked it back up and found I had no idea where I left off. This tends to happen to me, so I basically had to start anew, but luckily I was able to use some of my CSS and incorporate it here. Development continued offline and I reached a point where I needed to take online to see what worked and what didn’t
WordPress had just released version 2.5 and I knew from the beginning of this blog inception I wanted to use WordPress. Last year I worked on a blog design for WordPress, ultimately I had to stop because I accidentally deleted everything off the web and my computer hard drive failed. That sucked, but really, I wouldn’t have remembered anything I did anyways so I didn’t feel all that bad. The question was, where to start? I couldn’t remember anything I had done before, and I really didn’t have a solid grasp on WordPressing to begin with.
It all started to unravel from there. Things just weren’t working and my frustration grew. I began thinking, “Blogger really isn’t all that bad.” I decided it was a Yahoo! Small Business hosting problem. For one, they don’t offer WordPress 2.5 they offer WordPress 2.3.3 and I was unable to load WordPress 2.5 no matter what I attempted. I wanted this blog on 2.5 no matter what, so after checking on alternative hosting services I decided to go with mediatemple.
The good thing about Yahoo! is it’s web hosting for dummies. Almost any idiot can figure out how to do almost anything they want Yahoo! will allow them to do. The move to mediatemple was a dramatic difference. This is a service that is designed for people who have a solid grasp on web hosting. After signing up, I realized I might be a little over my head. But I persevered, and I was able to set things up, loaded WordPress 2.5 and started the long task of WordPressing my template.
Tags: blog, mediatemple, wordpress, yahoo!
