How This Disaster Helped Prepare Me For My Curent Vocation

[ This is part 4 of an 8-part article - Read Part 1... ]

Diary-X was gone, but my Diary habit was well-developed, and I really missed it! I tried making my own site, but the dynamic nature of diary entries made it impossible for me, as all I had were HTML/CSS skills and no programming skills to make something work dynamically.

I tried a couple of different options for self-hosted installations of blogging software, and wound up liking WordPress best. WordPress is a wonderful, beautiful, clean blogging/content management application that gets installed on your own web server. It’s easy to install and has a web-based dashboard where you can write new blog entries with the newest entry appearing first on the front page of the blog. Every time you create a new entry, the new one appears on top, dynamically! It also automatically creates archives by month, categories, tags, etc.

The way WordPress does this is by combining HTML, CSS and a new (to me) ingredient: PHP. PHP is a programming language created specifically to affect, organize and render web pages in HTML and CSS.

So I had one more thing to learn! You don’t need to know PHP (or even HTML or CSS) to write entries in your WordPress blog. But if you want to configure or create your own theme and make customizations to widgets and the layout, understanding at least a little bit about PHP is necessary and a strong understanding of HTML and CSS is critical.

And I wanted to have my own theme for my blog. Boy did I! It was a pride thing – no pre-fab themes for this self-taught handcoder who works in notepad and considers Dreamweaver and Front Page to be products of the devil!

Anyway, struggling through, and eventually learning, the ins and outs of WordPress as pertains to PHP and paths to the theme and how the widgets and plugins work really started to give me an edge when it came to all things WordPress. I even gained some some web server knowledge and understanding that helped me troubleshoot some frustrating issues when it came to upgrades and other problems that would pop up.

ACCIDENTALLY FINDING A NEED AND FILLING IT [READ PART 5]. . .

Evolving My Skills

[ This is part 3 of an 8-part article - Read Part 1... ]

Eventually I got divorced and had a great need to generate some extra income. A friend of mine suggested I go back to doing web sites, but things had advanced so much that my design/coding was looking really dated. CSS was all the rage, all of a sudden, and I didn’t know it at all. And I guess my faith in my ability to teach myself new skills had waned a bit.

But my friend really pressed me to give it a shot, so I built a few basic sites in CSS, and just did like I did when I learned HTML. I immersed, analyzed and absorbed. Then came the practice and practical application and voila – I had the foundation of a new skill set.

Something else that was happening at the same time was that I was keeping a diary on a web site called Diary-X. I had been doing so for about 5 years when the server running Diary-X had a catastrophic hard drive failure and every diary on that site was just suddenly *gone* never to return.

HOW THIS DISASTER HELPED PREPARE ME FOR MY CURRENT VOCATION [READ PART 4]. . .

Launching The SherryDedman.com Blog

Hello, welcome to the launch of my blog!  For awhile I had a website here attempting a Web Design service, but I soon learned that straight Web Design was not my thing.  WordPress and backend administration is my thing!  A much different animal.  I am attempting to improve and hone my web design skills, but I don’t think they will ever truly be my forte.  WordPress will always be my love!

This blog will probably reflect most areas of my online life, mostly professional.  The line gets blurred a lot, though, for a lot of reasons.  Clients often become friends, social networking is very social even though it’s used mostly for business networking, and I’m a “Work At Home Mom.”  There will probably be a lot of issues/strategies I can address here that will be interesting to other Mothers attempting to make a go of working from home, so that might be the subject of some of my blog posts.

By way of short introduction, if you don’t know me already, I’m a 41-Year-Old divorced mother of a Developmentally Disabled six-year-old boy and am running my own business (Blog Solace) and living in Bothell, Washington near Seattle.

My business is described as being “expert WordPress help” and I use self-taught, hand-coding skills to manipulate the CSS, XHTML and PHP within the WordPress platform to optimize both static and blogging WordPress sites.  I have vast knowledge of the ins and outs of WordPress and keep up-to-date on its advances, plug-ins, capabilities, updates, etc.  It truly is a passion, and it is not just my job, it’s my hobby.  I truly love what I do.

Please watch this space for my thoughts, insights, queries, and more on WordPress, life online, Twitter, social networking, social marketing (it’s just an interest, I’m no expert), SEO tips (again, not an expert, but I probably know more than the average joe), WAHM posts, and whatever I feel would fit into this space!