Writing For The Future
December 16th, 2008 by ComputerBob
For several years, I did all of my writing for this web site using straight HTML code, manually editing and then manually uploading each page to my web server in another state. For nearly a decade, I created and maintained this entire web site through a 56K dial-up Internet connection that often connected at only 43K. There were plenty of nights that I stayed awake all night, babysitting my dial-up connection as I re-uploaded hundreds of web pages after I had made even minor changes to this web site that affected them.
Then, a couple of years ago, I finally switched to Verizon’s cheapest, slowest-speed DSL service. That gave me about 19-times the download speed of dial-up — which made it a lot more fun to browse other people’s web sites — but it only gave me about twice the upload speed as dial-up.
So I often still had to stay awake half the night, waiting for hundreds of web pages to re-upload to my web server.
You can find my older, manually-coded Journal entries in my Old Journal Archives.
Then, several years ago, I redesigned this entire web site to fully use Cascading Style Sheets. That allowed me to make huge changes that affected hundreds of pages by simply changing and re-uploading one or two CSS files.
But I continued to manually write and upload my daily Journal entries.
Finally, this past June, I transitioned into writing my Journal entries with free and open source WordPress blogging software, which I heavily modified to fit the look and feel of the rest of this site. If you click on the word “WordPress” in the Journal Tag Cloud of this site’s home page’s right sidebar (or in the “Tags” line at the bottom of this Journal Post), you’ll see my Journal Posts that describe my extremely frustrating transition from manually coding my Journal Entries to using WordPress to write my Journal Posts. I call my newer Journal Entries “Journal Posts” because that’s what WordPress calls them. You can find several ways to access all of my current and past Journal Posts in this site’s home page’s right sidebar.
Most of the time, I write a new Journal Post and then upload it and you start seeing it immediately.
But now that I’ve been using WordPress for several months, one of my favorite WordPress features is the ability to write and upload a new Journal Post any time I want, but then tell WordPress to automatically start displaying it to my site’s visitors at a different time, or even on a different day.
For example, I finished writing this Journal Post about 11:52 PM, U.S. Eastern Time, on Monday, December 15, 2008, but I didn’t want it to appear that early, so I told WordPress to start displaying it to you at 3:00 AM, U.S. Eastern Time on Tuesday, December 16, 2008. That’s much more convenient than my old method of having to either wake up at 3:00 in the morning to manually upload my new Journal entry, or wait until the morning to do it, often in a hurry because I had a whole list of other things that I needed to do.
So, to make a long story not quite as long, I highly recommend WordPress. Unfortunately, in my case, because this web site was already huge when I began to use WordPress, it took me a lot of time and a lot of work to get WordPress to look and act like the rest of this site. But in the end, it was worth it, and besides, you probably wouldn’t have that problem if you started using WordPress.
And I’ve read that the newest version of WordPress (2.7) is supposed to be even better than the one that I’ve been using for the past several months.
I sure hope it’s not going to take a lot of time and a lot of work to get that new version to look and act like the rest of this site.
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Tags:
Coding, Future, Internet, Software, Web Development