I found something I wanted to share with you about upgrading your wordpress blog. It’s an incredibly clear and easy to follow guide to take you through the process step by step. It’s from a fellow who identifies himself as John The Geek, and if you don’t know about him you should. Here’s the link to get this guide. You do have to sign up for his newsletter, but I think you’ll find it tremendously useful. He knows all the geeky stuff, but more importantly, he knows how to explain that stuff in an understandable way. Check it out here:

http://JohnTheGeek.com/WPUpgrade/Refer.asp

If you’re like me, you’ve been hearing from the gurus that you have to be very, very careful when you upgrade your wordpress blog - that is, unless you buy their book. While I am learning a lot of techy stuff, I was sufficiently intimidated that I figured I didn’t really need to bother with an upgrade… Well, wrong. The upgrades have security aspects that really shouldn’t be ignored. Even if your old version blog works just fine, you should upgrade. And with John’s guide, it will take only a few minutes. So pick it up, then stay subscribed for a while, check out his blog, and see if this isn’t just a tremendous resource. Oh, and did I tell you it’s free??

I have another eBay update, too. Well, actually, two of them. First, if you haven’t seen it talked about, eBay has done a 180 on their previous announcement that they’d absolutely, positively not be allowing links off your pages anymore. They’ve decided to leave everything as is for the time being. So, if you have an opt-in on your About Me page, it’s apparently still okay.

And on my saga with them to try to get just one non-complying seller to play by the rules, well, not such good news. I did get another email from some support person who actually, at least for the first paragraph, seemed to have read my email. Then we got lost again. I was told I should visit the support center (and given the generic link, so I had to click around there for awhile.) They wanted to have a specific complaint about a specific item, but then won’t accept a complaint relating to the item because it’s not an active item. It’s been sold. Well, DUH! That’s my point. I bought it, I was given a download link, and that’s why I’m complaining. HELLO?? Bad enough that none of the complaint categories really fits the digital delivery ban, but I’m supposed to complain about a listing that I can’t prove is non-complying. It’s just nuts! And further proof that their interest in dealing with folks at my level is miniscule, at best.

So, that’s all the energy I’m putting into that mess. I’ll just keep posting my little CDs, keep encouraging folks to visit my website through the CD delivery, and work on growing a many-faceted web biz. Which is what we’re all supposed to be doing anyway.

Stay well.

I downloaded a WordPress blog package the other day, for free, followed along with the tutorials, and after a few tries and a few communications with my webhosting tech folks (who are great!), I got it installed. I’m quite pleased with it, and when it’s ready for public consumption, I’ll share it.

All the installation and utilization information is posted on a blog, and as I was reading the posts, I was reminded of just how scary I found working with programs and HTML was when I first started working on the web. The thing is, no matter how great wysiwyg html editors are, you really need to buck up and learn at least the rudimentaries of coding. By that I mean, try to figure out how things work. You don’t have to know coding itself, but at least take a look at html versions of what you’re working on.

I use Nvu as my editor, and it has the capability of showing the code for what I’m doing by way of a button at the bottom of the working page. I would imagine that most editors have this. So, take a look at what’s going on and how things are structured. Highlight a part of what you’re working on and see where it fits in your page in the code view. You probably want to save your document, then “save as” document 2 so you can play around.

If you have a program you’ve downloaded, you most likely had to unzip it to start using it, as I did with the blog program. That means, no matter how badly I mess up the unzipped one, I still have the original to go back to. Simply delete the one you screwed up, unzip the original again, and start all over.

There are lots of free books out there that will tell you about html, but I found them intimidating. Much easier just to get in and muck around to see how stuff works. That may not suit your style, and the books may be very helpful for you. The point is just that you need to get over being afraid and let yourself learn. You might find the same great sense of satisfaction that I did in figuring out something and having it work!