I've worked in and around technology for all of my professional career, but only recently have I been so hands on. Last spring I was asked to build a website for a friend in New York. Shortly thereafter I decided to build my own. To build it I started with Front Page but moved quickly to Dreamweaver, and got some help from students and friends. My web hosting service is icdSoft. Love them! They have great rates, great features and great customer service. I found them through a google search, checked out their ratings, and couldn't be happier.
A couple weeks ago I started building my blog. Little did I know what I was getting into. I thought I wanted a simple design, one page with entries, the ability to sort by date or topic. What's so tough about that??? I started with a Dreamweaver tutorial that was way too complicated and much more than I wanted. But I figured that I could adapt it once I built it. After a few days I learned quite a bit but threw in the towel and moved on. Bblog was next. It's a nice free full featured php based blog package. I got it installed, learned a whole lot more, got it working, then found that modifying the templates to make it look the way I wanted was a bigger challenge than I was up for at that moment. Next up, Movable Type. I picked it because it had a template that I liked. Later I found that the small adaptation I wanted to make would lead to days of trial and error. More learning.
Today it's working (last night, it wasn't). And I LOVE THEM! The Movable Type people. It's free if you're just doing a small blog. I like ti's features. (Search my blog!) The support forums are good. Right now my trackback isn't working, I want a link to the main page from the topic page and I want to add some links to the sidebar. But for the moment, I've had enough so this will just have to do! Anyway, after all these weeks, it's finally time to author entries...
