A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care
So I’ve finally persuaded myself to install a blogging tool on my site. I’ve always thought that the sound of a blogger as being that of one-hand clapping! I realised however that the tools available to edit and maintain blogs are useful to the management of a site that I have decided to utilise them to produce this site.
What is the reason for this site? Why it is simple, I have decided to archive the objective of having my own site listed as the first result in Google’s natural listing when one types my own name in - within one year. My name is oliver jenkins
and it took two months to obtain a domain and a hosting company that I felt offered the best combination of price and flexibility.
Domain
No argument or deliberation here, simply noted and waited patiently for my name (Oliver Jenkins) to become available as a Dot Com and registered it. It rather languished (about 6 weeks) while I looked around for a host to support it.
Hosting
The factors that affected my distinction (in order of priority) were;
- LAMP
- Less than £5 per month
- Cpanel
- Reputation
- UK based hosting and support
- Host account features
I finally settled on using www.easyinternetsolutions.co.uk
They met my first three criteria, and I have used their sister company www.diyhost.co.uk for a number of sites before so I new they would fit the last two criteria.
Putting hosting features at the bottom seemed a bit odd to me. However I realised that the vast majority of companies offer LAMP and that the only competitive difference between hosting companies is price. While writing this entry I’ve realised that I should have like to check that the host allowed the GD php library. Since I have some ideas that require dynamic images generation. However a quick phpinfo(); later and I see that my host includes this anyway.
I’ve just dodged a bullet with the GD choice, but I think it proves my priorities in selecting a host. It is so trivial for a hosting company to supply standard LAMP features that one can place them at the bottom when selecting for a personal home page.
Software
I am using Word Press
as the platform for this site. Their is no particular reason why I chose this platform. I could have spent hours evaluating various alternatives, but thought that this was a waste of time and it would be more profitable to just start something.
I narrowed down the list of software to use by simply looking at what was available in the Fantastico
section of CPanel. Having to just click and install something was the motivation factor in cutting out all the other stuff out there (http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=blog).
Word press seemed no better than the others apart from the sentence, WordPress is a personal publishing tool with focus on aesthetics
within the Fantastico
description. Sounds good, I’ve had some experience with trying to hack stuff to look half decent, so this put confidence in to me - Job done.
If this works out to be the case, I don’t know, if it comes to it then I’ll just change the damm thing.
Aesthetics
I have to change the default theme, as a matter of pride, as soon as possible. Keeping a theme that is available as a simple download is not what I’m looking for, I’m an individual not a consumer. Also the theme doesn’t work in Firefox when you resize to 800×600 so it looks like a rebuild.
We’ll have to see about Word Press’s claim of being focused on aesthetics when I attempt this.