I managed, a few years ago--and actually even a few years before that--to get a hold of some CSS coding techniques. But let me explain what that means. That means that I copied the template for my Livejournal onto my own computer and changed things until it looked the way I wanted it to. I taught it to myself, back in--I do believe--2007, while I worked at the History Center for the first time. I just fiddled with it until it worked the way I wanted it to, but by no means did I actually know what I was doing.
The web design course that I took in high school--even with all the work I put into designing my website every couple of years, teaching myself important things, using the obligatory dumb google question when necessary--that is just absolutely not cutting it anymore. My website is hopelessly out of date because it's still, predominantly, in html!
As I'm sure you can imagine, as a web-restless individual, and with excessive amounts of time on my hands, this does not please me at all. So I've been examining Wordpress, and how I can turn wordpress into a website for me. The biggest issue is getting a fully integrated blog into my site. I have always really hated the way that I couldn't get my blog onto my site and vise versa. The easiest fix to that is to get a blog install that also upgrades the site to a 2.0 platform... but I have no idea where to begin.
I bought a book about wordpress--mostly because I just like to buy books--and I feel like I'm redoing this whole thing. When I first bought my domain name and website, I was in the early years of high school--coming off of an Angelfire site or something like that, way, way, way back when personal websites were a tool more like facebook or myspace. A lot of artists--especially non professional artists--had sites where they could just show off their artwork. It also became a kind of "show off" to see what you could do with the web too. I used whatever I could get my hands on to design my sites, and I did get good at it, but it gets more and more complicated every day. I don't have the knowledge to back it up anymore.
So I've been frustratedly flipping through this book on wordpress, trying to understand what's going on. I do want to have a fancy website by September, so that I can make a lot of necessary changes to my "web presence". I want an integrated blog (which I will of course update with a lot more frequency, hardeeehar), and an integrated set of purchasing tools... and what that means, is just that I can get this Zazzle plug in to work. It also means getting flash galleries for my artwork, so that I don't get that nasty "popup blocker" notice when I try and look at the art on the site. I feel like some people get error messages when they visit KP because I have messy code that looks potentially malicious to an browser.
Anyway, I also want to get a domain name that better reflects the reality of what's on the site. The site was first named "KagaiPalace", in 2003 or 2002, after the "Kagai Family" in my novels, Demon's Broken World and Serpent of Souls. They were the evil demon family, that used to brutalize the mortals just for fun--back in the day when I was young enough to understand evil as being less complex. The theme for the website was full of black and bright colors, a "tortured", "gothic" teenager's dream. I remember I looked up "evil" in my online romanji Japanese dictionary, and it spit out "Kagai" and that is how these people got their name. A pair of them appeared in Serpent of Souls much later in my life, and they were much more fluid, complex characters. But still pretty evil and manipulative.
Now that you know that, of course, it's obviously not an appropriate name for a web portfolio of my own artwork, in a era of the internet where one does not fear putting out one's full name. I need a domain with my own name in it, on a web 2.0 platform, with a blog. In two months. It's doable. I know that. I could use a vacation for a couple of weeks so that I have the time to just do it. Oh! What excellent timing... the state government is shutting down, and I'll be out of work! Sounds like a great time to do a website.
The web design course that I took in high school--even with all the work I put into designing my website every couple of years, teaching myself important things, using the obligatory dumb google question when necessary--that is just absolutely not cutting it anymore. My website is hopelessly out of date because it's still, predominantly, in html!
As I'm sure you can imagine, as a web-restless individual, and with excessive amounts of time on my hands, this does not please me at all. So I've been examining Wordpress, and how I can turn wordpress into a website for me. The biggest issue is getting a fully integrated blog into my site. I have always really hated the way that I couldn't get my blog onto my site and vise versa. The easiest fix to that is to get a blog install that also upgrades the site to a 2.0 platform... but I have no idea where to begin.
I bought a book about wordpress--mostly because I just like to buy books--and I feel like I'm redoing this whole thing. When I first bought my domain name and website, I was in the early years of high school--coming off of an Angelfire site or something like that, way, way, way back when personal websites were a tool more like facebook or myspace. A lot of artists--especially non professional artists--had sites where they could just show off their artwork. It also became a kind of "show off" to see what you could do with the web too. I used whatever I could get my hands on to design my sites, and I did get good at it, but it gets more and more complicated every day. I don't have the knowledge to back it up anymore.
So I've been frustratedly flipping through this book on wordpress, trying to understand what's going on. I do want to have a fancy website by September, so that I can make a lot of necessary changes to my "web presence". I want an integrated blog (which I will of course update with a lot more frequency, hardeeehar), and an integrated set of purchasing tools... and what that means, is just that I can get this Zazzle plug in to work. It also means getting flash galleries for my artwork, so that I don't get that nasty "popup blocker" notice when I try and look at the art on the site. I feel like some people get error messages when they visit KP because I have messy code that looks potentially malicious to an browser.
Anyway, I also want to get a domain name that better reflects the reality of what's on the site. The site was first named "KagaiPalace", in 2003 or 2002, after the "Kagai Family" in my novels, Demon's Broken World and Serpent of Souls. They were the evil demon family, that used to brutalize the mortals just for fun--back in the day when I was young enough to understand evil as being less complex. The theme for the website was full of black and bright colors, a "tortured", "gothic" teenager's dream. I remember I looked up "evil" in my online romanji Japanese dictionary, and it spit out "Kagai" and that is how these people got their name. A pair of them appeared in Serpent of Souls much later in my life, and they were much more fluid, complex characters. But still pretty evil and manipulative.
Now that you know that, of course, it's obviously not an appropriate name for a web portfolio of my own artwork, in a era of the internet where one does not fear putting out one's full name. I need a domain with my own name in it, on a web 2.0 platform, with a blog. In two months. It's doable. I know that. I could use a vacation for a couple of weeks so that I have the time to just do it. Oh! What excellent timing... the state government is shutting down, and I'll be out of work! Sounds like a great time to do a website.
So, this is a new look for your blog. I like it.
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