How I Created My Latest Blog

Posted on 09. Jun, 2010 by Squealing.Rat in How To

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For my latest blog idea, inspired by a cool name, I decided to see what I could do with WordPress. In the past, I have complained how hard it is to get a customized look in WordPress, and my desire to mash up iWeb and WordPress. Fortunately for me, I remembered I had read an article detailing a solution. So I began.

Start

I started quickly, grabbing a free domain name from a 1and1 promotion, and setting up the hosting through Dreamhost. However, by the time you are reading this, the promotion is probably over. No worries, there are constantly new promotions from domain registrars trying to get you locked in. Keep a look out for Godaddy or Name.com specials. Using Dreamhost’s 1-click install, I installed WordPress onto emptyquotes.com.

Theme

Per the article I had read, I installed the WordPress theme Constructer, a deceptively WordPress-looking theme. After skimming through the article, I began playing around with the design.

Design

Fortunately, I had already laid out a mock up of Empty Quotes using iWeb. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to use the font in my design, but I wanted to come close. I began the tedious transfer faze. To begin, I took a screenshot of the logo with the title of the blog, with the nice font. (I created the logo by going through my font library, picked out my favorite font and then typed in two quotes, and grabbed a screenshot.) That logo I also uploaded to Gravatar, linking my Empty Quotes email to the image. This would come in handy in commenting and for adding a favicon.

Content

Content flowed very easily the first couple days, and I made sure to write down as many as possible as soon as possible, creating a good stock pile of 40 quotes, sayings or sentences. It is always great to have a stock pile of content to use when you get lazy.

Things I Haven’t Figured Out Yet

There are a couple of things that are still a little funky with my new method. First off, I haven’t figured out how to remove the author link, which should have been removed when I disabled that in the theme settings. In addition, Twitterfeed doesn’t seem to like the feed created by Feedburner, showing me an error regarding the issue of not have dates in the feed. This problem I solved switching to RSS2Twitter.

On the blog, the post dates are not shown either. I would like the option to edit what is displayed under each post, especially to remove the comments disabled, and the ability to have separate pages that just show what posts in categories. Also, the header of theme, even disabled seemed to interfere with linking using the sidebar close to the header, so I had to insert some filler text.

My Alternative

In the begining, I was going to use Tumblr, because it is especially designed for quotes, but decided against it, in part because I was not being able to customize themes easily.

In the end, I really liked the outcome of this new method, and in the future, this will be an option I will consider with gusto. In the meantime, what do you use to create awesome sites? Let us know in the comments!

The writer of this post compiles the latest tech news and more at Squealing Rat, and writes about tricks and tips of deception, trickery and survival at Lone Iguana. Find him on Twitter.

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