Becoming Obsessed With WordPress
I originally started blogging a few months back because it seemed like a great way to vent, and a great opportunity to fully develop a number of ideas that had been bouncing around in my head keeping me awake at night. I do enjoy the writing aspect of it, but lately I’ve become obsessed with the inner workings of the blogging platform itself. I didn’t do any research before settling on WordPress. It just happened to be the option my original provider had available when I decided to start a blog.
I was completely overwhelmed for the first 24 hours as I tried to figure out the most basic functions of a very sophisticated system. Writing a post was simple enough, but I had no idea how to alter the appearance or functionality of my site. I had some limited knowledge of HTML prior to this, but had never delved into the world of PHP or CSS. With the help of some kind folks in the support forums, I started to make sense of things over the first couple of weeks.
I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point in this process I became a computer geek. Once I began to understand how to make it do the things I wanted to do, I developed a severe case of obsessive compulsive disorder. If you usually read my posts via RSS, you wouldn’t realize that the appearance of the site changes constantly. I’m not a designer, and don’t pretend to be, but today marks the fourth or fifth major redesign of this site since March. There are still a few things I haven’t finished yet, so it will continue to change for several more days. I’m still working on the header image, and there are no page navigation links yet.
Since I’ve been “between opportunities” for the past few months, I’ve had plenty of time to get familiar with the system. What I enjoy is mucking around in the code and figuring out how it all works. My constant redesigning is purely experimental. At first I would dive in and change things at random just to see what happened. Once I began to develop a sense of what the individual pieces did, I switched gears and started trying to make it do very specific things. I’ve still got a lot to learn, but it’s all getting clearer. The day the site stops changing, you’ll know I’ve figured out everything there is to know.