I spent a few late nights and most of Friday and Saturday trying to catch up from what seemed like a pretty big deficit, not having gone through the tutorial in class the day Greg explained CyberDuck, GitHub, etc. I was able to get a laptop computer with the appropriate software and hardware, and load everything that I needed on it. Unfortunately, I had to learn a few things on my own, such as how to use CyberDuck, how to use GitHub, and how to set up a child theme. Greg was able to help me a bit over e-mail, but he stood me up on Skype. Yes, Greg, I waited up most of the night staring at my screen waiting for you to call. It was pathetic.

The only thing I still need help with, as far as the initial setup is concerned, is how to get my real site to display my content. I transferred my entire wp-content folder to my domain and I am pretty sure it is all there. However, for some reason the actual site still displays just the regular old stock WordPress page … with none of my content. (I’ll need you to help me out with that one eventually, Greg.) In the meantime, I decided to just keep working on my site locally. And what I found seems to be a common theme (pun intended) amongst a few of my classmates. I wasn’t that familiar with WordPress, so I didn’t really know what options were available. It seems like most of what I know how to do, WordPress already has covered. So the challenge is finding a way to customize my site, that isn’t already a WordPress option. In order to accomplish that, I basically just started to go through the options and take notes of what I couldn’t do on my own. There were quite a few style options I wanted to see, that I couldn’t find. So those could be examples of things I could add. I also went to the Internet in search of some really good WordPress sites, and I found a few sort of “Top Ten” sites to peruse. I took a look at the code on those sites, and that generated some ideas. That’s what I’ll work on over the next week. Hopefully I’ll have something that looks presentable by next Tuesday. We’ll see.

The best part about this week was that I learned how to set up my own site. I liked that more than just about any other part of the course so far. It isn’t something I think I could have learned on my own, even though I did have to learn quite a bit on my own. It was really helpful to have the links and resources handed to me, and to have at least a general explanation. I think with a little more class time, I’ll feel more comfortable with the process of managing my own site.

As for now, my goal is to just get my content online.