OK. So this is not good. I’m blogging here because I feel obligated to, not because I feel like I’ve got a bunch of stuff to write about my progress on the Michael Jones program.
Well for now I should update that I’m busy trying to manage the union of a two other websites (http://www.wakundama.com and http://www.touchthesource.com) with this blog. So I’ve been tackling the technical issues of how to move over a blog from wordpress.com hosting service to an independent website hosting services. So far I’m discovering that you’re a bit more constrained in what you can accomplish if you go with a standard free wordpress.com account on wordpress.com owned servers. The standard free wordpress.com blog account is real easy to setup, but then it comes to trying to do things like using a plugin that auto posts blog entries into facebook you’re out of luck. I also feel like if you want a better chance of having other people find your blog (because I think a big motivator behind blogging is that others will find it), your more likely to be found if you’re off wordpress.com owned servers. I just get the sense that on wordpress.com owned servers wordpress is in control of your visibility.
So I’ve now gone thru about 2 exercises of setting up and migrating two different blogs to become stand alone websites no longer tied to the wordpress company. All I have to say is that this stuff is NOT EASY. I setup a website back in 1990 and despite all my computer experience since then, I’m finding that setting a website setup IS NOT EASY STUFF. I’m the expert at my workplace in maintaining a very complex website and I’m finding that setting up a wordpress blog on my own and getting it to look and work precisely how I want is hard work. And once you figured out how to do things the first time, you’re not that much better off when you get to the 2nd wordpress blog. You just muscle your way through to get things to work, and once you get something to work you sort of never have to do this again for a long time and so tend to forget what you did. I think I am rambling. So let me get to the point.
I have learned a lot technically going thru the process of now setting up 2 different wordpress blog websites. However, I would probably need to go through many many more installations before I could ever write something intelligible for someone else to use in setting up their own wordpress blog. I don’t have time to setup many more installations because the goal is to blog not to setup a blog.
An upcoming challenge I will want to tackle is how to upgrade the wordpress software. This blog is as of this writing based on WordPress 2.8.6 I’ve been advised to upgrade to the latest version WordPress 2.9. However, before I proceed I need to figure out how to backup my blog content, because the upgrade process could erase all my blogs. A quick lookup of how to do the backup so far had yielded instructions that suggest that this is not going to be straightforward.
So fairly soon I’ll let you know if I make the upgrade to WordPress 2.9 OK. If I don’t you might just end up seeing a blank blog.