Blessed by the Potato

As you can tell, I’m still figuring this whole thing out. It took me about 5 hours to get Apache, mySQL and PhP running on my old computer. I think that’s longer than it should have taken, but anyway…

I’ve got three tasks ahead of me for this now:

* The first is to figure out this CSS stuff (I never used it before, I’ve always gone with regular HTML). I want to make this mesh with the rest of the page, which means getting a custom graphic in the header, and getting a decent white-on-black theme going (ideally with News Gothic MT as a font, though I may have to switch to something else since it isn’t installed by default on WinXP). As you can see, the layout is ugly. I’ve got some learning to do. However, I’m told that once I do figure it out, it will be useful for automagically slapping on the formatting I used to cut&paste in notepad.

* The next is to figure out how to code in php myself (this blog is powered by WordPress, which isn’t quite as straightforward as thier website makes it sound, though it really isn’t too bad).

* Finally, I’ve got to sort out hosting. I’m highly in favour of not, you know, paying for an additional web host, but it does little good to leach bandwidth off Netbug. Setting up one of my own computers to host is an option (one I’m seriously looking into), but then I have to keep it up & running all the time (minor issue) and deal with the website eating up bandwidth while I’m trying to play warcraft (a bigger issue). I’m also concerned that the webpage hanging out there in cyberspace might just totally advertise for hackers (ugh). Oh yeah, and the evil Rogers empire might come and shut me down and make me use “their” geocities “service”. If I end up going with a paid host, I’ll probably try to get some ads on here, or do some more book reviews and become an Amazon affiliate or something. (I won’t need much revenue, hosting looks to start for as little as ~$10/mo — but that’s still more of an expense than I want to eat just to entertain you guys).