The Library Geek

I finally did it. I have created my own blog and have been blogging for the last four days. Here are my experiences on working on this week’s activities for LIBR 246. This week was all about blogs. The activities involved the following: installing the blog software, creating and styling the blog, adding more functionality by installing plugins and widgets, and doing several posts that would involve putting in an active link and embedding a picture and a video.

* Installing WordPress and setting up permissions

So, after first skimming through the setup instructions provided by Prof. Faires on this week’s activity page, I gained enough confidence to just go ahead and start setting up my directory, installing WordPress and configuring the permissions on SJSU’s hosting server and at the same time come up with a mental image of the form and substance of my blog.

It was nerve-wracking. Although I am familiar with installing and using a variety of software, following the detailed instructions to the letter with dire warnings that a misstep can mess up other students’ blogs was going through my mind. It felt like I was diffusing a bomb and about to make a choice whether to cut the blue wire or the red wire! I exaggerate; the instructions were actually quite clear and straightforward that I did not have to fire up the video or Elluminate versions of it. I did not encounter any problems till I reached the part wherein I needed to change the MySQL configurations and the error was more because I was already tired from the day’s work that something so simple did not occur to me.

The first misstep was when I can’t find the location of the MySQL Settings. All I see was the end of the page with commands on how to save, delete, etc. I then made the wrong assumptions that maybe, I just need to cut and paste the whole thing. The next misstep was that I did not realize that I was typing and changing codes at the wrong spot since clicking on a spot does not automatically transfer the mouse cursor. And of course, the result was an error and it did not work.

I paid dearly for these missteps. As I was not sure anymore where my errors started, I decided to do the “easier” way of cleaning up my mess by deleting the WordPress file and start installing again. Apparently, it won’t allow you to delete a file folder if it has a file inside, so I had to delete every file before I delete the folder. I tell you, WordPress has a lot of files and a lot of folders.

That took a while but after managing that I skipped the instructions to set up the connection to my directory and go directly to the installation of WordPress. After the installation, I realized that if I maximize the window I would be able to see more information, and lo and behold, the MYSQL settings were there all along. The second spark of realization was not only do I execute the command to change the position of the cursor, but I need to move the cursor by using the arrow keys of the keyboard. After doing all that everything was fine and WordPress installed and worked perfectly.

* Creating and styling the blog

The next part was in my experience, the hardest part and time-consuming of all the activities that is, creating and styling the blog and I discussed in this post the reasons why I went for the theme that I now use. It took me awhile to decide on which theme to use because there were so many choices available on WordPress. I went on and tried several of them and that of course involved downloading, unzipping, and extracting them to your local file folder and then doing a SSH transfer to your directory on Senna. I finally went with the theme Whiteplus because it has the style that I want for my blog, namely, a three-column layout, tabbed pages, and a simple and clean background. The only problem with this particular theme was that the banner photo used does not blend with the focus of my blog, so I decided to change the banner photo. I actually liked the banner photo of another theme called Desk Mess. The banner photo is of a messy desk filled with the usual knick knacks like a phone and coffee mug. So I decided to change the banner photo of Whiteplus with a photo similar to the banner photo in Desk Mess that is a photo of my own study/work station at home!  So I went to work cropping and resizing the photo in Photoshop to fit the banner size and named it header saving it with a .psd extension. I created another file from the same banner with the Fireworks extension  .png. You see to change the banner photo I had to replace two files named header inside the folder named image ( header.psd and header.png) of the photo you want. And to create the Fireworks file you only need to use the “Save As” command on Photoshop and save it using the .png extension. Now all I have to do is replace those files on the images folder inside themes folder on my directory on Senna. After a refresh of the blog, I now have the photo of my own home workstation as my banner photo.  Everything was chugging along smoothly.

* Adding functionality

The next activity was to add functionality to the blog by installing plug-ins and widgets. I installed Snap Shots integrator, Quick SMS, the Meebo Me plugin, Category Icons and  Pagemash. Quick SMS and Meebo Me are both messaging applications with the former going directly to my cellular phone, while the latter requires a Meebo account created and logged on for visitors to message you.Snap Shots is a plugin that gives a snapshot of the site when you point the mouse cursor on its active link. And Pagemash is for easy organizing of pages of your blog. I only activated Meebo, Snap shots,  Category Icons, and Pagemash. The only one that took awhile to figure out was Meebo since it requires copying the code in the page and part of the page you want it to appear. Instructions on installing the plugins are available on their respective sites linked above. Pay particular attention to the instructions for those plugins that require an activation key. You only need to look for the key on the folder of the plugin on your directory.

* Posting with embedded picture and video

Embedding a pictures and videos on my blog was the easiest part among the activities since it’s just a matter of copying the code and pasting it on the post, the only thing critical here is that you post it on the HTML panel rather than the visual panel of the post and you will be fine. Before I conclude this piece, I also want to mention that I added two pages on the blog so far. One is an “About Me” page with a Web 2.0 twist or copying the code from the Voki avatar that I created for the previous week’s assignment and pasting it on the page. The other page is a Star Trek Resources page wherein I copied the code for the Google custom search engine that I created for the course LIBR 202 under Dr. Chris Tomer. Again, nothing much to it, just a matter of copying the code found on the Managing my custom search engine page of my Google account and pasting it on the post page of my blog.

So there you have it, my experiences in creating and maintaining a blog for the past four days, I hope I was able to share some nifty ideas that you might want to try on your own blogs and do hit me with a comment if you have any questions.

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.