Category Archives: WordPress

WordPress Wednesday

It’s Wednesday and that means it’s WordPress Wednesday. Every Wednesday a group of my fellow WordPress enthusiasts meet at CoCo to work, hang out, and share expertise with each other and anyone who shows up with questions. Coco is a Twin Cities provider of co-working spaces, providing members with a place for working and networking. My membership gives me 5 days a month to use the facilities. You can do 3 days a week or every work day. I joined so I could hang with the WordPress Wednesday group and so I could get out of the house once in awhile and get some human contact. Working at home can make you feel very isolated.

I got into WordPress as a platform for blogging, actually for this blog. Xanga was going downhill fast and I wanted to have a self hosted platform for Horizontal Ambition. I had some experience with building static websites, having used Dreamweaver to build a portfolio site that I thought was pretty cool, but to blog you really need a CMS (content management system). At the time I didn’t know what that was, but I got myself a Godaddy hosting account and registered the domain and started my first WordPress installation. Not too long after that, I was at the now defunct cigar shop in the neighborhood and somehow fell into building them a website using WP. Then another denizen of that smokey cave told me he’d heard that I was a WordPress expert. He needed help with his site, so I jumped in and quickly learned that I didn’t know jack about WordPress.

From that point on, it was down the rabbit hole. I googled around and discovered that WordPress was actually a CMS that could be used to build just about any kind of dynamic website you could think of. I went to the monthly meetup of the MSP WordPress User Group and sat through some presentations that went so far over my head they had contrails. But I met all kinds of helpful people and heard about WordPress Wednesday. I traded in my iMac for a Macbook Pro so I could bring my work to with me, and I’ve been showing up on Wednesdays ever since. Although I’ve been kind of scarce since I had my unfortunate confrontation with a floor, but I’m moving around much better now and I’m getting back into the groove.

In fact, that’s way more than 300 words and I have to shovel the f**king driveway and head over to CoCo Northeast.

That’s two day in a row! The Timberwolves would call that a winning streak.

From the beginning

This post was originally going to be about WordCamp Minneapolis, a meeting of WordPress enthusiasts that took place over the weekend at the downtown St. Thomas campus. People come from all over the world to these events, to learn about WordPress and to rub elbows with other true believers. It’s a great community and I love being a part of it.  I was going to start out with a brief history of how I got into WordPress, and I started thinking about how and when I got into blogging.

Me in 2004
Me in 2004

And that brought me back to Xanga.I ran across the concept of blogging and I’ve always kept journals and kind of fancied myself as a writer so I dug in to find a blogging platform. Not sure how I landed on Xanga, but I think when I did, my kids immediately abandoned it.

Continue reading From the beginning