It turns out USF tech support works 24/7. No idea whether that's because it's in India or whether we have grad students who are that desperate for a buck, but it's handy for me! After a brief chat with the support guy about what I needed, I learned that USF doesn't let students set up MySQL databases. If we want blogs, we're supposed to use the tools at blog.usf.edu. I needed a different host.
I found one with some help from my friend, who kindly let me take a subdomain on her own site, which uses CPanel. I'm very proud of myself; without any further help from her, I managed to create the subdomain, transfer my website, set up a MySQL database, configure Wordpress, and install the blog. At the time this felt like a very significant achievement, a real leveling-up moment for my nascent web-guru ability.
I quickly discovered, though, that Wordpress is much more than I thought it was. It isn't blogging software at all, it's a whole enormous pre-built website that happens to be shaped like a blog. Installing it is the easy part. The hard part is making it do what you want, and, more to the present point, making it look the way you want -- because goddamn if it didn't circumvent my nice CSS sheet in favor of its own. And the labyrinthine design of the out-of-the-box Wordpress website means that it's really hard to figure out what to change. In principle, I want to take the CSS design I had, stick Wordpress's blog in the content box, create a little box under that one where the sidebar is supposed to go, and have done. But things do not seem to be that simple. Frustration sets in. I wonder whether I should have settled for news updates in text format, with no blog technology at all.
But I am lucky enough to have two aces in the hole. My first is my friend, who has reskinned Wordpress sites before. Maybe she can help me. My second, my fallback, is that my original site is still on the USF server. I have lost nothing if this experiment fails, and I've learned a great deal!
No comments:
Post a Comment