I'm Going To Need To Learn WordPress To Pull This Off. Preferably Fast.

[dr_pretentious]

I'm off to a good start. The first day I laid eyes on a Cascading Style Sheet, I managed to figure out what was wrong with it and fix it. (The links linked, but were the same color as all the other text. All better now.) It took me forever, though, because I know almost nothing about WordPress.

If I'm going to keep producing new work, find homes for the old work, promote works new and old, and, y'know, have some kind of family life and enough paid tutoring gigs so I can afford to keep writing instead of getting a full-time day job...

Okay, now that I look at that list, I'm overwhelmed. Solution for the moment: stop looking. Look later.

Right now, what I really need is a concise yet comprehensive beginner's guide to WordPress. I need to get good enough at it, fast, to get fast at doing it well. I need to get that website to kick ass in a way that will then take only ten minutes a day on average to maintain. Because I'd rather be writing stories. Isn't that what I came here for?

So, guys, any suggestions?

Comments

[jasminewind.livejournal.com]

I would suggest you use a different system - I have seen a lot of complaints from bloggers about WordPress. I don't know what is better, or maybe bloggers just need to bitch about their interface sometimes, but it seems to be a problemmatic and limiting system. Says the gal who doesn't blog at all and has no personal knowledge whatsoever.

Solution for the moment: stop looking. Look later.

Brilliant solution - I intend to implement it in my life regularly!

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

If I give up on WordPress, then I need to build the website entirely from scratch, sacrificing the design it has now. Or I'd have to learn some other system well enough to replicate it, which seems like even more work. The prospect of learning how to add downloadable audio files to a website that's already built is less daunting, from a time-sink perspective, than the prospect of building a website entire.

If I think too hard about all the other things I need to use that time for, I'll begin to have an aversive response to the website, which is how it went neglected for three years. And during some of that time, Deena was well enough that I could have asked her to give me pointers, or even just fix stuff for me, if I'd been on the ball about it.

Often it seems to me that it was a good thing I finished having my kids before landing a big book deal. Suppose I had sold a novel to a New York publishing house and then had the childbearing years I had. That would have been the missed opportunity that keeps on missing. Above the level of small press, the system is merciless. Not-so-great sales lead to dismal preorders next time, and low preorders doom you to even lower sales, and after a while in this vicious cycle the figures attached to your name in the distributors' computer systems doom you to a permanent place on the publishing industry's de facto blacklist. The only solution I've heard of for getting back into the game once you've lost it is to publish under a new name. Worked for Robin Hobb.

Anyhow, my days of juggling a toddler and a newborn are safely behind me, and my youngest sleeps through the night. That must mean it's time to take the world by storm. Right?

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

I've been working with WordPress for about three years now. Basically, once you get it set up, it should only take 10 minutes per day to maintain. (So long as you don't paste things in directly from Word, because Word does genuinely horrible things to just about every web-based text editor.)

Is your WordPress already set up (design, etc.) and you just need to post to it? Or do you actually need to set it up?

I can't say enough about Lynda.com: http://www.lynda.com/WordPress-3-training/essential-training/71212-2.html

I am not actually in New Jersey, but I would be happy to lend a hand on a virtual basis (phone calls, Google Hangouts, etc.)

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

maybe bloggers just need to bitch about their interface sometimes

You got it in one.

WordPress is just fine, depending on what one wants to do with it. It's a robust enough CMS that one can do full website installations with it as well as blogging. I think it will be a long time before drpretentious exceeds its limitations.

[annathepiper]

Speaking as someone who's a techie, I found Wordpress easy to set up on my own server--but then, I'm comfortable with setting up the things Wordpress needs to work, too, i.e., a web server and a database server.

If you yourself are NOT comfortable doing that, though, I would recommend one of two things:

1) Set up your site on wordpress.com and then point your own domain at it. Wordpress.com is specifically intended for people who want Wordpress sites but who don't want to manage them themselves. They do the heavy lifting of setting it up and everything; all you have to do is figure out what themes or plugins you want.

2) Get a friend who's capable of setting up a Wordpress site to do it for you. If you don't want to go with Wordpress.com I'd be happy to host a Wordpress site for you on murkworks.net; we're already running, let's see... four active different Wordpress blogs, and I manage them all, so it's trivial to add a new one.

But that said, I'd still recommend option #1 just because while I'm happy to host blogs for people, murkworks.net is NOT a commercial-grade service and I'd recommend that for a formal author site. Many authors go that route--I know John Scalzi has a WP.com site, for example.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

That's a very kind offer. I think my hosting situation is okay. I found a manual that clicked for me, and I'm much less daunted now at the short term goals. I'm a little stunned at the range of what's possible, actually, but setting new, vaster goals is a task for a different day, weeks or months from now.

[annathepiper]

Yay successful manual! Glad to hear you're finding a workable solution. :)

[onyxtwilight.livejournal.com]

See your email. :-)