Cathy's Blog

So today, I decided to overhaul my website. Back in 2005, I wrote a custom blogging tool for my website. Okay, maybe it wasn’t really an “tool” but it was definitely cool. The admin page consisted of features to create a new post (with tags), edit an existing post, and delete a post. I worked for several weeks on this tool and in the end I was proud of the outcome. I used mySQL to store each post and all associated information about it (date, time, subject, author, etc.). I then wrote a PHP script which I called Feed Builder to generate the mySQL rows (only the most recent 5 or so) into standard RSS XML. From there my feed was readable by almost all RSS readers and my own website of course.

This was awesome! Now speed forward to today. About 3 years and 4 months later, it’s just a pain in the you know what to post anything to my blog. I decided to give WordPress a try. After reading through the hosting features of WordPress.com, I found it was extremely limited in terms of what customization was available. Of course, if you are willing to pay a small fee, you can get some of that customization back. I then discovered WordPress.org. It was like finding my way into Heaven (if I could imagine that for a second). Anyway, self-hosting WordPress sounded like a dream.

So here I am about an hour later after customizing this thing from left to right and top to bottom. I can pull in my Flickr photos, post directly from Flickr (with the photo of my choice), and pull in custom RSS feeds (like my Yelp reviews). Ahhhh, I feel right at home. Now if only I will feel more at ease posting to my own blog. Enjoy.