Learning WordPress

(This post is part of my Onwards and Upwards Blog Event)

It’s been a month and a half since I changed from my old Jennifer’s Jumbles blog, to this new Jennifer Grace Creates blog, making the switch from Blogger to WordPress. I want to share some of the progress I’ve made with you, in case you’ve ever considered this switch, and to show you I’ve been working hard! Equally, if you’ve worked hard on a blog development of your own (whether blogger or wordpress), or you’ve learnt something else technological lately, then please tell us about it in the comments!

My wordpress blog is self hosted (WordPress.org rather than WordPress.com) at SiteGround. So far I’ve had no problems on that side of things, there were lots of tutorials on how to set it up, and I have a useful husband to help with it too! Plus their cutomer service is good – after I’d set up the account I got a phonecall from them asking if everything was okay or if I needed any help (Aweber, my email service, did this too!)!

The next thing was to set a theme for the blog, and I chose Suffusion, because it seemed very customisable, and again there were lots of explanations on how to do things, and a help forum. One day I’d like to get a blog design done specifically how I want it, but for now this one is working very well and I can change things with just a few clicks. Here’s how it looks inside my dashboard, where you make the first choice, your colour scheme. Mine is Minima.

One of the things I’ve learnt a lot about since I switched is HTML. Just little things, but it was confusing at first. For example, all my imported posts (I used Blogger Importer to copy them all across) had all the paragraph breaks removed, as wordpress stores this info differently. So I went back through a bunch of my recent Blogger posts adding this code: 

wherever I wanted a paragraph break! I don’t have to do that for new posts thank goodness.

I also have to use code in the sidebars. For blogger sidebars you can click to add an image to your sidebar, but for wordpress.org you have to input the html in a text widget. I have to host the image somewhere else (I use Photobucket) and put the link in the code. For example, the code for my avatar picture looks like this:

<center> <img src=”http://i871.photobucket.com/albums/ab280/Jennifergrace_photos/DSC05646JG3_zps066b411c.jpg&#8221; alt=”” width=”225″ height=”225″ /><center/>

After widgets I started investigating Plugins. I like ‘Fonts For Web’ which I use to change the size, colour and font of my text, as there aren’t many options for doing that in WordPress. It comes up with a lot of fonts, and I especially like the typewriter ones. I know these don’t all shown up on everyone’s computers, but I’m hoping when I choose a strange font, they can still read it, just in basic font rather than fancy? No-one has complained yet anyway!

can you read this line? Does it look unusual?

Other plugins I’m trying out are SpamFree WordPress (which seemed to be working okay until this weekend, perhaps I broke it with the sheer volume of comments?), Shareaholic (the social ‘sharing is caring’ buttons at the bottom – I like these but I’m not sure if anyone is using them?!), and LoginRadius (for commenting via your facebook, twitter, etc accounts – this doesn’t seem to be working that well, but I’m going to give it a bit longer to see what I can do with it). Each of these has to be installed and tweaked a bit, which can go on for hours…

There’s still so much I want to learn. I want to get the comments fixed, I want to add a gallery page of my layouts and cards, and I want to make a blog button for myself. I will get there, bit by bit!

Be Inspired:

Use some typewriter font or a typewriter embellishment on your next project

If you’ve got a blog, go and tweak something you’ve been meaning to fix!

Scrapbook about how the internet has affected your life

Don’t forget that commenting on this post, and any other over this weekend, will count as an entry into the Grand Giveaway, but only if you’ve registered your interest in winning that prize right HERE!

See you again in a little bit! x