Out with www, in with wp!

A long time ago, I started creating my own site in php.  I used to have some facility in php and enough of a grasp of css that I thought I could develop a whole site.  It would have a blog with site-specific news (that’s what this wordpress was for), and it would show my most recent posts on livejournal, and it would have pages about me-as-a-writer, maybe some of my stories would go up.  The other key thing was that it would have some of my non-writerly things on it, which would have their own color scheme and a different title.

I did amazingly well at creating a logo/title I liked and at setting it up to have a welcome/why-you-should-be-here bit at the top, and even succeeded at getting two columns to have site news and lj-blog news.

But the layout… not so much.

And then I wondered… why am I spending so much time on this, when wordpress is designed for this stuff?  Other people do *amazing* things with wordpress.  Am I too good for that?  Too lazy to figure it out?

Finally, I’ve thrown in the towel.  I’m accepting wordpress as my personal website-savior.  I’ll probably write some posts on LJ, some here which cross-post to LJ, and some here that don’t.  (LJ people don’t care when I update this site.  Then again, you might not either.)  So, I’ve added all sorts of nifty plugins which should make this look the way I want.  (Notice the nifty Haiku Corner plugin, which randomly displays an unformatted Haiku!  I could not, for the life of me, get it to preserve line-breaks.  I don’t know why either.)  It should accomplish all of the things I intended with my liza-developed site… only be easier to maintain, with all sorts of nifty features that I don’t have to develop.

Any day now, the index.php at www.intelligentlizard.com will go away, and for some time you will be redirected here, to www.lizaolmsted.com.  (Until I manage to move the contents of wp. to www., without losing anything important.  Wish me luck!)

I am excited by this change.  I’ve wanted to have a nice site for myself for a long time, so I could direct people to it without being ashamed.  Soon, it will be possible.

Published by

Avatar for Liza Olmsted

Liza Olmsted

Software QA Manager Emerita, Co-founder & Acquiring Editor at Thinking Ink Press, fiber artist, writer, hiker, cat mattress. ND. she/they, aspec.