Get the wife a personal web/blog page they said. Use WordPress (WP) it will be easy they said. So why, more than a month after “starting” are we still struggling to get this going?
I’m a digital immanent. That means I was introduced to computers in college when they were still new, relatively simple, and the internet as we know it did not exist.
In the early years of my career, I would (now) classify myself as an embedded engineer. That means that I worked on the small processors that are contained within devices that make them work (not necessarily smart). At HP in California these were the “brains” in the electronic instruments. These systems were simple enough that one could understand everything that was “going on” inside the box.
Later in my career, when I was working on larger computer systems, the things that I was involved with was still relatively straight forward. I had a good sense of the hardware, software, and firmware interactions.
Then I went to a “pure” software company.
It was a great “learning” experience. However, I amazed that people could get things done without really knowing the underlying technology. They just relied on the “magic” to work. Or not work. The software was often quite fragile but it was “good enough” for the business.
While successful in my new role, I still missed the “good ole days” when I understood what was going on.
Sooooo, then I decided to get Tammy a blog page for Christmas. I did the heavy lifting on selecting a hosting company and getting the domain name moved to this company and all the other the stuff to make the web/blog site live.
I purposely didn’t do too much research on WordPress as I thought (bad choice) we would learn it together. I even got her the (small) book “Starting a successful blog when you have no clue”. I has the subtitle, “7 steps to WorrdPress Bliss”. The book spend most of it time on setting up accounts and domain names which I had already done.
Then it gets to a quick fly by of Word Press (WP) and “Select a Theme. It’s like reading a book to learn how to swim. These people have been in the water so long they they can’t relate to those of us who are floundering. Bliss my ass.
OK, so I know that WP doesn’t actually create any pages. All the info is in a MYSQL data base and a bunch of PHP scripts parse the data and spit it out to your web browser. It was originally created for blogging, but now it is used for a variety of web sites.
Then WP gets helpful. They have this Pseudo GUI front end with all the controls for creating and managing your pages and posts. You’re supposed to select a theme, but I’m not 100% sure what that is getting me other than the “general” look and feel which you are expected to change.
Trying to find where you need to change things is a nightmare. Apparently, the creators of the WP Dashboard never read (or heard of) the book “The Design of Everyday Things”. Very little about it is intuitive. I know I want to do and are struggling on how to do it. (We want white background behind the blog post you can read it over background – how hard is that?). I still don’t have an understanding of the relationship between the Theme and Templates.
And then there are the tools on top of the tools (I’m not sure how many layers there are here) that are supposed to “help” you. This just adds another level of indirection. Many of these assume you have the site “Setup” and are now entering content – adding new postings or today’s coffee special.
There’s lots of sites that tell me how “easy” it is. But I’m (we are) still struggling to get the site “built” so we can start doing the fun stuff.
Sigh