chr’s personal website

After having lived for about 5 years completely under the “google radar”, it took me about 5 months to decide, wheather I really want to have my own weblog and share and expose my life and thoughts to the public. Decision taken - bought a domain, installed wordpress. 5 minutes + 5 minutes.

But wait: I know far too much about websites and how they work to just take this installation as it is delivered. But of course, I also know far too little to really hack into it and get the results I wanted to have. This comes probably from having run a programming company without ever having written a line of code myself. It’s pure “ya-know-I-could-do-that-too-pride”. The result: 5 days of desperatly trying out around 25 or so plugins and reading tons of html, php and css code that I can hardly understand, let alone rewrite. It’s not that I really learned a great deal from doing this, it’s rather about having piece of mind that what I already have (installed) is really what I want.  Only then I could deactivate and delete all of these plugins and focus on the obvios: the content!

Man, to all of you “I know a little about websites”-guys out there who start a wordpress-blog out-of-the-box, I can only say: forget about the zillion fancy wordpress plugins and just start to write. Keep the toys for later.

So here’s what I learned: I was just very afraid to NOT commit any strategical errors before really starting to fill the site with content - be it the site’s architecture, the theme chosen, the directory structure, metatags, link structure, multi-language structure … but what the hack - FORGET IT ALL. Just write!

Wordpress is an incredibly well structured and amazingly flexible application. You can just change everything, everytime you like. Even “after the fact”. I really mean that. You can move the whole stuff into another directory on your webspace, or only “virtually” move it … the only thing you should take care of from the start is keeping you link-structure consistent and permanent. But don’t worry … it will stay permanent as soon as you stop hacking around ;)