My First Wordpress Entry….
So, here it is, my first wordpress blog post. I’ve been blogging for a year or so on Yahoo! 360, mainly documenting the travelling I was on before taking on the challenge of launching my own business. I expect to some level I’ll keep that up, for my personal bits and pieces, but this blog will really cover internet issues and will work in tandem with the website I’m building at miggle.co.uk
And as part of that development on the site, what have I learnt so far? Well, I’ve started to re-learn all the PHP and MySQL which I’d last used in 1999. And I’ve remembered how addictive I find the whole art of coding. Up until I started on my site my gym attendance had been pretty regular, but its subsequently been replaced by many hours sitting in front of the laptop, often not vacating my dressing gown till mid afternoon.
Of course, to build a site in 2007 is to be able to build one which really adheres to standards. I got the following advice from an old colleague of mine in reference to what should I be using these days to build my site with:-
HTML - the markup of the page (the actual content). I’d recommend html
4.01 strict
CSS - include a style sheet at the top to make the content look how you want
JS - javascript to add behavioural elements.
PHP - runs server side and is in the business logic sphere of what your
page is doing
MySQL - stores the data
Use html 4.01 strict. In fact, I’m going to point you here:
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/
Yahoo! open source a load of it’s javascript and css stuff. It’s great
place to get started. Check out the Grids section for getting page
layouts done quickly for example. It will also help with the ajax stuff.
It’s a gold mine.
This then is my starting point.
What else have I learnt since then?
As you can see from the look of my blog, customising Wordpress to follow a certain style (one you’ll see on miggle.co.uk soon) is fairly easy to achieve, given a few hours messing around with the default Kubrick template.
I am becoming a Google user by stealth. And that’s not just search. Currently Google Docs and Spreadsheets are proving to be so much better to use than Microsoft Office, particularly on this very slow PC. And of course for sharing its great. I’m experimenting with the custom search engine, learning my webmaster tools. I’m yet to go fully gmail, but I think that time will come very soon.
Microformats are likely to be very useful indeed!
And there are many other things as well, but maybe more on that another time…
