Monthly Archives: July 2013

Fear of Commitment

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I’m having a fear of commitment issue. I know how I want my blog to look, but I’m having trouble vocalizing it, and even more trouble trying to figure out what theme would be the best launching pad. I’m afraid that if I commit to a theme that I later do not like as much as another one, I’ll be stuck.

I’m very excited to keep working with WordPress. I’ve spent a good amount of time going through the themes and beginning to lay out my plan.

What I’m most excited about having learned are the possibilities in general that a site can do. I need to keep myself narrow-minded, though, and focus on certain things and not all of the foreseeable possibilities.

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I just finished the assignment to try and create / install a child theme. Consider myself filled with a million new questions.

Anytime I feel remotely confident about something learned, that confidence lasts less than 24 hours until something reminds me that I know nothing. I feel like Jon Snow:

I’m even finding directions confusing at this point. I tried following the WordPress directions on how to create a child theme, and I’m not even sure I did it properly. I’m also not sure how much stuff I was supposed to change, but I tried fixing a few things that I don’t like on the current theme.

The guest speaker from last week was helpful in terms of showing us what is possible with WordPress, but the material was covered so quickly that at the time I thought I understood, but now that I’ve had a week to sit on it, I’m not so sure I can replicate anything that he did.

Actual, factual results

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I like that we are beginning to see results on our own webpages, because the conceptualization can only get you so far. I feel like we have learned a new foreign language (or several!) in a short period of time, and only now are we starting to talk to anyone in those languages.

One of the greatest skills in a work environment (like mine) with coders and management is the ability to be a liaison between the two. Seriously. Coders talk in these funny languages and everyone else talks in English (or French, or Spanish, etc) and usually neither side takes the initiative to try and understand the other. The ability to understand “code-speak” and translate it into real results is a highly valued commodity, and I think that this class is beginning to make it a reality for us.

In my normal coding experience, we specialize so deeply that once we send the code to production, we simply move onto the next project and rarely see the end result. To be honest, I have never really cared because all of the work I do refers to life insurance accounts and how their algorithms work. It has never really engaged me more than the simplicity of my work, and I have always wanted to get out of that business (hence journalism!), but with this class, it has brought me back to why I started learning about computers in the first place. I am very excited about what we are doing, and have already been envisioning building the website to host several things that can be related to a new business and journalism at the same time.

Switching to a Manual Transmission

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When I first tried to host my own WordPress site a few years ago, I didn’t know anything about coding, MAMP, Github, or child themes. Everything was automatic, and I picked out a free theme and did little to edit it. I didn’t love the theme, and I had my own ideas about how it should look and what I wanted it to do. It was, however, simple. There were only a few instructions, nothing extra to download, and it was still free.

Getting out of that automatic mindset has been difficult. When using WordPress, there are shortcuts every step of the way. When setting up my hosting, they offered a one-button install, which I did. It gave my WordPress site its title and immediately let me using the site, but didn’t necessarily make it easier to edit. In trying to edit my website, I found myself back to square one.  In class, we set up a sample webdev final project site, but in making High on Endorphins I had a lot of questions, and not enough answers for the series of questions. What was my database name? My SQL username? Should I enter “localhost” or my BlueHost information, if I was going to be running it through MAMP anyway? Are all of these answers different on my actual WordPress than on my localhost version? A lot of these simple problems were easily answered when we did it together, but now working on my own, Google is providing most of the answers to my questions.

Although Codecademy was a challenge, learning to code is only half of the battle. Simply getting the new code into a working website, using multiple applications and dozens of steps, and figuring out how to make it all run once its written is taking a while to get used to. Once I finally become comfortable with all of these steps, then I’ll really be free to really experiment with the code. For now I’m going to just keep Googling, learning, and practicing.