erayjames.com

Troubles with inexperience

ray — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 18:58:12 +0000

While I have a good grasp of the fundementals, the “doing” part of learning may be the most frustrating. Installing the theme wasn’t really that much of a problem but when it came to getting Gallery installed (haven’t really used it yet) the difficulties multiplied to the point of gridlock. With no one around in the iSchool who had tried a WordPress theme with Gallery to manage a lot of photographs, I felt alone with the documentation and a looming deadline. Trail and error–lots of errors–forced me at one point to get Blue Host to cleanse my space completely. I then reloaded WordPress, the plugins, the theme, Gallery, the plugins for that, and then the previously built pages. After that it went smoothly and I finally had the site up with Gallery ready to manage images. Unfortunately time expired, presentation time loomed, and I went with a version without albums of images, which I really wanted. The next problem game when I tried to insert poetry. PDFs and JPEG images of the poetry were awful and the HTML played havoc with my carefully wrought formatting. Other classes and other projects demanded time but soon I’ll come back to this site to add images/albums, written works, and clips. The site validated as Strict XHTML on its first try so there’s that to feel good about.

Building this site

ray — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 21:45:36 +0000

While I have worked on this site for several days, this is the first time I’ve felt confident enough to begin writing about it. After realizing that I wanted to create a Web page not only a blog, I had to go through the process of deciding whether to use Dreamweaver to build the site from scratch or to build on the work of others, that is, copy someone’s code or use another scheme to get a headstart. In the end, based on the advice of a classmate, I decided to use Wordpress and build the Web site off a Wordpress theme or template. That brings me to today when work intensified. I added the image I wanted (taken with a little panorama camera I travel with, heading southeast on U.S. 87 between Texline and Dalhart in the Texas Panhandle late on late-May day, 2006) and hope to get a front page up to replace the blog page. This process requires a meticulousness that prompts caution–perhaps more than needed–as I dislike backtracking to correct mistakes.

Hello world!

ray — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

How in the heck did you get here? Since you are here, have a sit, read a bit, comment.