Today is February 1st, 2008. I'm going to document how to create a blog from scratch.
It's 11:00 p.m. I just spent an hour on the phone trying to learn how to upload this file.
The first this that happen was I got an error message "Error, unable to upload one or more files. Software caused connection abort: socket write error. So I called Godaddy for help. Wait time, 8 minutes.
What happened was I used to instruction from the book and saved my page bloggerinstitute.htm. I uploaded the file with that name. That you can't do. You must upload the file name "index.html" . However, I named it Index.htm. When I refreshed the page, the Godaddy index page came up saying that the "bloggerinstitute.com is coming soon." I had to call back to Godaddy. Another 8 minute wait. I was put on hold for 3 minutes. The technical support rep said I had to rename the file with a lower case "i" because "Linex is picky like that".
So, as you can see, it takes a lot of time, knowledge and expertise to become a professional blogger. Stay tuned for tommorrow's journey.
Tags. What is a tag? A tag is a command that is put into the html page to format how the document should look.
I wanted to bold the text Lesson # 2, so I inserted the H2 tag.
I just started a css style to this page. I created margins of 20% on the right and left. I'm using the Head First, HTML CSS & XHTML book as a learning tool.
Now that I have started this blog, I can't just put just 1 hour in. I'm motivated to learn and add diferent elements during the day. I just added "Blogger Institute" at the top of the page. I also added my url to Google.
This week, I'm going to attempt to find out how to design a sidebar. You would think from having three books that it's pretty straightfoward but it isn't. One author is obviously an Apple user. So, I don't know if the coding is the same. It's certainly different in description.
I've learned to change the heading to blue in CSS style.
Along with designing my blog, I'm working on traffic. I want to include the places I'm building my traffic at. I just went to Technorati to claim this blog. Their instructions were to add this link and then post. Technorati Profile
Have you ever walked down the street and stopped to watch construction workers build new construction. I would like to think of this website in the same manner. It's not complete. However, it's nice to come back the next day to see what is changed. I hope to entertain you as well.
There is too much too learn about CSS. I'm about to go crazy. I'm planning on taking my time with building this site. It definetly takes time. I did find a wonderful site that I plan on going to daily. University of Minnesota Duluth
After a week of looking in all the books I bought on CSS, I was totally lost. The books don't seem to be written in a way that I could comprehend. So, today, I bought "CSS, The Misssing Manual" by David Sawyer McFarland. I've wiped out all my previous CSS rules and started from scratch. I so much would like to start designing my blog.
This book is only 14 chapters. My plan is to learn and implement something each day from the chapter. Due to my full-time job, it might take a month for me to get through all of the chapters is I allow 2 days to get through them.
So the lesson today. Changing the color of my H3 tags. I changed them to red. The code is H3 {color: red;}. All rules must be placed after the style type="text/css".
Ok, in addtion to designing my blog as I go, I've decided to add a bit more content. I'll be adding resources for building web traffic. My first stop was BlogHuB Blog Directory I'm also going to show a graph of my web traffic daily as I promote along the way.
Here is a list of social bookmarks that I submitted my blog to today.
Here are two blogger forums that I joined.
Here are the serach engines and directories I submitted today.
Here are some social bookmarkings I submitted to today.
I tried to submit my site for an RSS feed at Feed Burner but it said it was invalid. So I had to go to my hosting company and then join Feedburner Forum to see if I could get an answer.
It's almost 10:00 a.m. and I've spent the last three hours going to sites to promote this blog, learning different html/css codes. This proves that becoming a professional blogger takes time. Rome wasn't built in a day.
It occured to me that this is a web page and not a blog because my entries are not in reverse-chronological order. Unfortunately, CSS nor HTML will allow me to impliment that. So, I now have to learn php. I think. So until I can figure out how to impliment that this page will have to be read in chronological order. I'm going to by a book today to teach myself php.
After coming back from the bookstore, I was unsure of what program to use to create reverse-chronological entries, comments, and archive entries. So I posted questions on Digital Point, BloggerForum, WebMaster-Talk,WebMaster Forums,
Yesterday, I found a book at Borders called "Blog Design Solutions." In Chapter 7 entitled "Write Your Own Blog Engine", showed how (with php code) how to build a blog. I bought it without hesistation. When I got home, I installed MySQL on Godaddy. I then tried to create the database. However, the first field they tell you to put in post_id. When I tried to save it, MySQL said it was invalid. I got home this evening an tried it without the underscore and it worked. I started to write the code in my notepad while reading paragraph by paragraph. Trying to comprehend all the coding made me soporific, so I turned in for the night. Tonight, I should have some time to right the code and install it.
Last night, I got home around 7:00 p.m. I spent 3 hours typing in code. I still didn't finish. Writing your own blog is much harder than I thought. However, it will be much easier comparied to writing in html code. Hopefully by Sunday, I'll have a working part of the blog.
Over the last few days I've been learning php. I found a few good sites, bought a book Saturday called, "PHP 6 Fast & Easy Web Development." I now have a total of 7 books, I've seen over $250.00 and I still no closer to creating a blog. Its only been 19 days. The funny thing is, I can't find out where people learn this blog programming from. I've tried putting in "blog engine" into Google but I haven't come any closer to finding the answers. This really is a unknown trek I've chosen to to walk.
I finally got a breakthrough on the design. I've finally come to understand how to use the css style, and the div tags to layout the webpage. It really wasn't that much coding. This is the site I must give credit to Glish.com/css/7.asp
I finally found a book the explained PHP in a way for me to understand. PHP Solutions by David Powers has written what seems like a book for absolute, non-technical people to understand. As you can see, I'm started to create a form for me to automate my entries. However, the code in the book seems to be incomplete. It does say that the complete code can be downloaded from a website but I've yet to get through the book to actually find where the site really is.
I'm going to over the next few months switch between designing and creating this blog as I sometimes can't bear looking at my own incomplete design.