nicholasguindon.com

Hey everyone,

So this is my very first post on a brand new website. Not much is up at this point, however there’s a lot happening under the hood. I’m not much of a blogger, but I’ve decided this will work well as a development blog for the site (at least for now).

The domain and hosting were purchased from GoDaddy.com yesterday evening, both were up and running that night. I’m not sure how that compares to other hosts, but personally I was pleased with the speed. The Deluxe hosting package comes with a pretty impressive 1000 email addresses, yet they all have a disappointing 10mb of storage space. Minkis pointed me in the direction of Google Apps, a service that you sign up for which gives you GMail with your domain name. It also comes with a Calendar feature which, while neat, will probably go unused.

After that was set up I decided to go looking for various features – blog, forum and photo album. As I said, I’m not much of a blogger, but WordPress was discussed on G4TV (the show Call For Help, specifically) and it seemed like yet another interesting thing to learn. The photo album is mostly for my mom, who likes to take many pictures. The album should facilitate her distribution process. I’ll probably end up putting some stuff up there too, though (like my cruise pictures). Finally the forum is another thing that’ll likely go unused, but it’s another neat thing to learn.

I went to the Wordpress website and downloaded the program, then started setting up MySQL. I hit a small snag (for those who know the config process, GoDaddy is part of the 1% who require the localhost) so I headed to their forums to check for the solution. I discovered that GoDaddy has a “one click installation” process for WordPress, amongst other services. I was impressed to find that they also provided photo albums and forums from the same place. I ended up choosing Vanilla Forum and Coppermine Photo Album – they had the best user reviews.

I’ve got a long “to-do” list with this website, but here are the essentials:

• *Get comfortable with the basics of WordPress, Coppermine and Vanilla (henceforth WCV).
• *Set up a presentable homepage.
• *Update the University page content.
• *Modify WCV to conform to the design of the homepage.

After that’s done, I’d like to learn how to set up a persistant / universal navigation bar and template. With those two things I could create a new page simply by uploading the new content and it would automatically coform to the site design. I could also add to or change the navigation bar a single time and those changes would appear all over the site. Finally, I could make aesthetic changes to a template and have it appear everywhere (likely the nav. bar will be part of the template). If I want to make a nice website, I consider those abilities essential.

I suppose that’s all for now. Enjoy my new site!

Nick