tourenwagen

I knew I wouldn’t be able to go for very long without dealing with/talking about the blog tool.

My first effort at building a web page was way, way back in the before times — 1995. I wrote HTML with a text editor. I used some images to give some color to the page, but I made sure they were referenced in a manner that kept them in the cache on the client side. Between my simple page design, sparse coding, and clever use of tiny gifs, I had a site that looked good but was very fast over dial-up.

My second effort at a web presence was a blog started (and still ongoing) in 2000. A friend, who’s a web site designer/provider, has his own machine at a co-location facility, and has developed his own body of code, largely PHP, HTML and CSS, to create multiuser blogs. It’s pretty good stuff. And since it’s his own code, he can easily jump in to customize it for clients.

His code favors clean, sparse design, which fits my web style. And it allows jumping right in with just about any type of HTML tag. There’s a “page design” page that allows one to input CSS-style presentation controls. It’s all very simple and powerful, but requires some HTML and CSS knowledge (or mad cut and paste skills) to control formatting.

So now I’m trying out WordPress. Although there are a wide variety of popular blogwares and CMS’s out there, I picked WordPress because a) it’s good enough and b) lots of people use it, which means there’s a large user community to tap into. There’s a tremendous amount of control of presentation that can be done with point-and-click. But I have the sneaky suspicion that I’m going to have to do some php coding to get exactly the presentation that I want. (E.g. changing K2 to align-left rather than justified, and to tweak the width of the main column.)

The first problem I’ve run into is angle brackets. I assume this is a feature of WordPress, rather than the K2 theme (aka page design) I’ve chosen. On the “Write Post” page, there’s a wysiwyg-style entry window or an “HTML” entry window. The problem is that the HTML entry window doesn’t like my HTML. Apparently, the angle brackets that it introduces (via “HTML tag” buttons) are different from the angle brackets that I type. Since it doesn’t have, for instance, a center HTLM tag in the predefined buttons, what’s a boy to do? Actually, it’s quite easy. I use their buttons to introduce any old HTML tag (and close), and just change the text inside the angle brackets to the HTML tag I’d like to use.

Very weird limitation, but very simple workaround.

To confuse the subject further, there’s a bit of WordPress jargon called a “template tag”. This appears to be a mixture of HTML tags and PHP automated page generation. For example, the title text of this blog is generated with a template tag. Another topic to learn about, another day