Happy New Year. I hope your holidays were restful and enjoyable.
I had a more ‘restful’ holiday than I had planned due to a minor, but annoying, health issue. The result was positive though. I had alot of time to sit on the couch and blog and do research on the web. One of the more interesting developments that I have been paying attention to is how the presidential campaigns are using the internet to support and facilitate their efforts. I anticipate that the web will play the most significant role that is has to date in the upcoming campaigns. This is a result of the viability of the new web 2.0 technologies, and the new applications and tools that are taking advantage of them.
I have also been giving thought to what I want to do with my web site this year. My current site, shfwilf.wordpress.com, was intended as a personal site where I could blog about any topic of interest to me, and where I could organize my links and keep a journal. I have also used it as a tool to test out WordPress (to see if I want to stick with it as my blog app), and to build my basic blogging skills. My current blog has satisfied all of my short term objectives, and I have decided to take the next step in my blogging ‘career’. I have purchased web hosting services, and have begun to construct this new site with WordPress as my blog app.
Net is, I may not have much time to blog here for a few days/weeks as I am building my new site. I just started building it yesterday, and I have made good progress, but I still have quite a ways to go. For example; if you go to the home page for the site (lifeisanongoingprocess.com) you will see an ‘under construction’ page that does have a working link to the blog page, but once you get to the blog there is not a link back to the home page….yet – I am working on it….
This is a big step for me in my blogging learning process, so the going may be slow, and the results may be shaky at first, but I feel it is time for me to ‘take the training wheels off’ and to master more of the underlying technical skills I need to take full control of my web site presentation and functions.
I plan to keep both sites operational for the short term.
Blog on,
Carol
BTW, I am using bluehost as my hosting service. I am delighted with their service thus far. It is affordable, easy to use, good support (phone & on-line help desk), good performance, and fairly good documentation. I even got a phone call from them yesterday making sure that I was satisfied with their service, and directing me to their support phone number if I had an questions or problems.
Just me testing the comment functions….
Couple of requests, I don’t know how easy they are to fulfil:
- can you provide an ATOM feed?
- can you provide a feed with the full text of your entries? Right now I can only see the first sentence, and then have to click through my feedreader to the site in my browser.
Otherwise, all looking good!
I’ll have to research the ATOM feed – get back to you on that one.
I have changed a setting that I think might take care of the second issue – please let me know
Compliment appreciated
Still researching web feeds and WordPress functions and plugins. I found an ATOM plugin for WordPress, but it looks like it overrides the RSS feed – so it’s an either or deal – I want to support both RSS and ATOM.
I have been reading some good references off the Books 24X7 site at work – most notably; Professional Web APIs with PHP: eBay, Google, PayPal, Amazon, FedEx, Plus Web Feeds by Paul Reinheimer, Chapters 1-4. Also reading info on Feedburner and Wizzcomputers sites trying to get a grip on all of the standards at play and what service providers are implementing with these standards.
Net is that I have much to learn about feeds and I’m not sure how soon I will be providing RSS and ATOM….so, just RSS for now.
Thanks for the tip on the Demopoulos book. I have been reading it and his first book, Everything you Need to Know and Why You Should Care: blogging for Business, which is also well written and interesting.