I will be writing a bit more about Mexico, as I wait for all of the trauma to settle in. There was beauty too. A whole lot of beauty. But I’m mainly writing because one of my daily reads, The Pioneer Woman, is putting forth a bit of an illusion for her devoted readership. I’m talking about her useful post, Ten Important Things I’ve Learned About Blogging.

There is only one thing she writes that really hits it on the head — when she writes:

5. Allow your boundaries to set themselves naturally.
Don’t feel like you have to sit down and set rules about what you will and will not blog about from day one. Just blog, and see what feels comfortable for you.

I did that.

I’ve found, over time, that I tend to blog about the same things I’d talk to my sister about.

I’ve also found, over time, that I tend not to blog about things I wouldn’t talk to my sister about.

For example, I don’t blog about hanky panky.

I also don’t talk to my sister about hanky panky. If I did, she’d cover her ears and say, “Okay, gross.”

And you probably would, too.

What she doesn’t say here is that her blog is designed for a specific type of pleasure for her readers. Her boundaries are very much set by what her readers want to see from her. She knows what they don’t want to see because she has to listen to her readers complain in the comments section. I don’t think her sister has very much to do with it. Sorry to say, but if this is the kind of thing she talks about to her sister they have a very shallow relationship. Not to say there is anything wrong with shallow. If you can’t talk at all to someone you usually just put your best face forward and kind of fake it. And The Pioneer Woman definitely fakes it. But she does it very well. She does it so well that her blog is a must-read every morning. No one would tune in if it was just one complaint after another. No one wants to hear about how much her server costs or how long it takes her to edit and upload images. Or how frustrating it can be to always be taking photos while everyone else lives their lives.

I do blog for a living on my other site and I can tell you, it leaves little time for real life living. This sacrifice is never discussed on Ree’s blog because that would kill the very illusion she provides. Can you imagine if she started whining about how hard it is to sacrifice that much time? She makes funny jokes like “laundry is piling up” or talks about being in her yoga pants while the kids work the farm. When, pray, is there time to home school four kids? This conflict is very rarely touched upon because the illusion must be upheld or the illusion will fail.

So, remember this – a blog like Ree’s is not successful because it tells the truth; it is successful because it gives women what they want: a fantasy. Endless amounts of fattening food — while Ree stays nice and thin (pretends to complain about love handles), a gorgeous husband, a pretty house, etc. Who wants that illusion to be marred by reality? No one. And as long as Ree can uphold the fantasy, her blog will be successful.

Being someone who works ten to twelve hour days blogging, I can tell you that what I see on Ree’s site is a perfectionist at work. She’s an incredibly ambitious, hard-working professional. She is anything but the character she plays on TV.

I don’t know who picks up the slack in Ree’s life. I don’t know who really homeschools those kids. All I know is what I see on her site and what I can imagine goes on behind the scenes.

What I do know is that she is probably bitching a lot about a lot of things to her sister and to her friends. Those things will very rarely make it onto the blog. So, no, it isn’t about blogging what you would say to your sister. It’s more like, “blog about what you would say to other moms you don’t know on a playground.” You know, brag about your kids, your husband and pretend you don’t have to worry about how many calories you consume.

I’m not hating at all. I admire Ree and I have learned so much from her over the years. I don’t buy into the fantasy, though. And I sort of resent it a bit when she writes stuff like this. Does she think we’re idiots?

I do appreciate her hard work and dedication. I see her, though, as a career woman first and a mom, wife and teacher second. Just my two cents.

Ten years ago I taught myself to read and write html. All of these years later I’m fumbling my way through CSS, PHP and MYSQL. I’m learning as if I were plunked into a foreign country and made to learn their language by simply jumping in and struggling through misinterpretations and frustration.

I am not someone who thinks in any logical way about anything. I am completely lacking in common sense, and all of my educational background — to the tune of a student loan that is upwards of $100 grand — is in the arts. Therefore it seems kind of contradictory that I would love code.

But I do. Somehow.

It is the same impulse that had me taking apart an iPod once and putting in my own toilet. It is my favorite refrain from the forgotten David Mamet/Alec Baldwin/Tony Hopkins movie The Edge, “what one man can do another can do.”

Strength is one thing. If I CAN’T do it, I mostly won’t attempt it. But if it’s possible? If it’s just a matter of figuring it out? I feel that I am up to the challenge most of the time. Even if it means delivering a finished product that is half-assed.

WordPress and php are entirely fascinating. All code is fascinating to me but PHP is my new favorite thing. One thing I love about it is the magic you can create with it. It is remarkable that one little comma or semi-colon can throw the whole thing off, but if you get the code just right? And stuff actually works? Amazing.

WordPress has a wealth of resources for those of us who want to dive right in and get our hands dirty with code. The thing is, it is totally logical and follows a set of rules. It won’t confuse you once you understand the basics.
The Codex at WordPress will give you almost every little piece of info you need to hack your current WordPress theme. And if it isn’t easy to understand in Codex — because sometimes it isn’t; sometimes they leave off the simple stuff you need to know, like how to wrap a php command. They just give you the command and you have to figure out how to wrap it and where to put it. Nonetheless, it is fabulous.

If the Codex doesn’t have it, chances are another blogger does have it. So do a google search and then poke at it. Just make sure you always have the old code to return to once you fuck up the new one you’re playing around with.

There is nothing more satisfying, I’ll have you know, than figuring something out and having it work. I am still confused by CSS. CSS freaks me out on any number of levels, but it is one of my last challenges. I prefer the code that makes things work.

So, if you find yourself completely confused by how WordPress works, do yourself a favor and start diving in, hacking your theme, and figuring out how it all fits together. It will be a grand learning experience.

In all of the years I’ve been online, I’m still surprised to find that every single day I find a new voice, a new vision, a new person who is handing out useful info, advice, or just plain beauty. Today’s cool person is Derek Sivers. I found him via Lifehacker (a great site) and immediately, I’ve already learned several important concepts. Some of them confirm what I suspected but weren’t yet a certainty (I HAVE MY CERTAINTY!).

Sivers gave up his investment in CDBaby and put it towards charity, musical education specifically. That is “his story,” but his blog is full of great advice that he gives away for free.

It’s a streamlined, non-cluttered site with the important stuff to know up front.

What drew me there was his post on how not to thwart your own development by assuming you are smarter than everyone else and that you already know everything. Not a good long term plan, it turns out.

He says to assume you are below average – and that may be the thing that saves you. The other really spine-chilling bit of news for me? Something he just wrote a week or so ago on why it’s important to provide something FOR others rather than just for yourself. This is especially true if you are hoping to make money as a blogger; you aren’t going to make a dime doing what I do on this site, that is, write for my own pleasure without giving back much to my three readers. And that’s why I only have three readers. The moment I start giving a lot back to readers? That’s when people will come, Ray. If you build it, they will come. People like information. They like a daily surprise. They like wit, beauty, even conflict. They like political discourse. They like commentary. So, if you wanna be a blogger, read Derek Sivers and you will learn much, Grasshopper.

That’s the thing about blogging that occurred to me last night, as we stumbled out of California Adventure — the souls of our feet aching, our psyches bled out, our wallets drained – my thoughts were on the Oscars. Or they were on this other site I’m trying to get launched, or they were on a part of a site that I know needs a lot of work but if it works it will be great. My thoughts on it never end. That either makes me driven or it makes me a maniac. This is one key aspect about blogging that is different from being a journalist.

Journalists don’t have to build things from scratch. They are always getting credit — mostly from so-called PR guys – but really, most people who bag on blogger and praise journalists give the credit for doing the actual reporting. That means they make phone calls, ask questions, write a story, get paid. Lately, many of them have been getting laid off yet the bloggers remain. Why? Because most of us did it before we were making money, and many of us would do it even if we weren’t making money.

Moreover, we do it all — create and maintain the blog, pay for the server, put out content every day. And yet, we are thought of us as parasites who suck the life blood from real journalists. You’d think they’d be happier knowing that someone was taking their story and sharing it with their audience thus the story is read by more people. But no. It doesn’t work that way. It’s THEIR Tonka truck. You can’t play with it.

Do I sound bitter? I guess I do a little bit. I’m a bitter person. I eat bitter for breakfast. No, not really. I don’t really eat breakfast. But I do wish that the journalists would figure out a way to evolve into this new medium so that their loss of a job wouldn’t directly impact the way they treat and write about bloggers.

The beauty of the internet is that it’s like a farmer’s market – you can wander here, wander there – you can pick up an organic apple at one stand, some coffee at another. The mode of the giant supermarket isn’t the way it works online. There is no such thing as one-stop shopping. And what exactly is wrong with that?

Ugh. This has not been a great week. If you want to blog, know this: the more successful you become, the more people are going to hate you. I am unfortunately an Oscar blogger, an invented genre, an invented profession and one no one respects. It is like uttering a dirty word in a crowded room of nuns when someone asks you what you do. I usually just say “I run a movie site,” or “I run an awards site.” It almost always requires further explanation.

The great thing about the internet is that people don’t often rely upon one site or one voice. They can hop around from site to site getting their daily fix. There is competition, always. And there is usually a winner. Everyone else scrambles to either top the winner or eke out a little piece of the pie on their own. I’ll let you in on a secret: it all kind of makes me sick and any day now I’m ready to jump ship and go teach elementary kids.

If you write for your own purposes, or for fun, and you don’t care much about traffic or about making money, this won’t apply to you. But in the blogging world, niche to niche, there is always sniping, fighting and competition – blog eat blog.

This piece was a drag because it was the usual old school style of old school reporters/journalists trying to make the bloggers look like fools. There have been several of these hit pieces written over the years. Had I known that’s what it was going to be I never would have agreed to talk. I felt like Jane Alexander in All the President’s Men. Stupid to fall for it. I should have known better. This is the thing about journalism that I have always had a problem with – their lying and pretending in order to get a story. Okay fine if the story is about a corrupt President. It’s a whole other thing if it is just yet another “the bloggers are so silly, useless and stupid.”

We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to us. Queer in the traditional sense as in “weird.” Or queer in the gay sense. Either one works.

I don’t think I came off that badly. Supposedly there is a Part Two coming and god only knows what tiny bits of shit that came out of my mouth will end up in it. From now on I am taking a vow never ever to agree to interviews about bloggers. Good idea, right? One is always hoping to be better known to drive up traffic, to make more money.

I support my family (my daughter and me) on what I make so I am motivated to work hard. And I am motivated to continue working as long as it is profitable. When it stops being profitable I will likely pack up my suitcase and leave the circus.

So just know that you will be hated and you will have to deal with that hate. How do you deal with it? I’ve seen bloggers turn off comments altogether. If you have a lot of mean commenters you could turn off the comments. But community building is apparently how it’s done nowadays so if you can at all help it, don’t turn them off. You can deal with it by walking away from it on a daily basis and doing something that makes you feel better about your own life, and the world at large. Yoga, for instance. A hike in the mountains. A trip to a museum.

Or you can just ignore it. For me, being vanilla doesn’t work. I am too opinionated. So I guess I have to ignore it. Until I can’t stand it anymore.

After a very long, tiring and ultimately drab Part 1, I think I can streamline things for you in Part 2.

But let’s refresh our memory.

1. Think of a site name. Register it with a registrar site, not the hosting site which offers free domain registration – you will be stuck with them for a long time unless you go to the hassle of transferring. I use godaddy.com for all of my site registrations.

2. They will send you a confirmation. Then you must get hosting. Find a decent host that you like – pay around $20 per month, not less, not more. You can pay less if you want, but don’t pay more until you need to later on.

3. Once you get the hosting, they will send you instructions. In those instructions will be their DNS pointers. You need to know these in order to point your site name to your server. They will look something like:

ns1.nameofsite.com and ns2.nameofsite.com

Log in to your Godaddy site (or whatever your registration site) and find domain manager – or DNS manager. There you will be given a way to change those numbers. And put in whatever your hosting says to put in. But usually they start with NS1 or NS2.

3. Your hosting site will give you a temporary address to start uploading files. This would be an IP address or a temporary site name. You can wait until your domain name has forwarded to start uploading files, or you can upload them to your temporary site and change them later.

—-The thing to remember about web stuff and blogging is that SHIT HAPPENS. You have to be flexible and patient. An old boyfriend of mine used to use the term “poke at it” until you get the right result. If something isn’t working, poke at it until it does. And that seems to work. You can’t really break it so usually the shit that’s happening is some kind of code error or connection error or permissions error. SHIT HAPPENS. Don’t lose patience. Just know that it’s part of the deal.

4. Okay, so you’ve got your site name and it’s been pointed to your hosting company and when you type your site name into your browser it goes to a temporary page. It’s all good. Things that can potentially go wrong would be — you didn’t enter the right DNS numbers, or you were a number off. But usually, it goes fairly smoothly.

Your next step is to download WordPress. I am not even going to bother telling you to use Movable Type. I gave it up long ago. I think it is a wonderfully developed program, but I think it is too top-heavy and WordPress has a better development community, that is, people who are investing a lot of time to design plugins and themes (we’ll get to that later) for WordPress.

Go to WordPress.org and download the latest version (you will have to repeat this process every time WordPress has an update, which is often).

5. The whole SQL debacle. Basically, many programs that are the future, or certainly the right now, run off an SQL database. I am just now starting to understand the SQL language. But that’s not what you need to know. You just need to know where your database is and what the login and password are. Sometimes your website control panel (given to you by your hosting company) will have set this up for you. Other times you need to create a database, a user and password. Either way, you need to know these for installing WordPress.

Sometimes, you can just upload all of your wordpress files and point your browser to:

http://www.yoursitename.com/wp-admin/ and you will be prompted to create a configuration file. There you will enter the database name, login and password. That’s if the permissions are set correctly. Otherwise, you’ll have to enter the information manually.

And it isn’t that hard, really, just poke at it until you get it right. You can’t break it.

Here it is summed up:
1. Download WordPress software.
2. login via FTP to your new hosting site.
3. Upload all of the wordpress files into your main site — it will be called either public html or web or sometimes just http. Most of the time, when you login in via ftp you will be where you need to be. Don’t upload the wordpress folder. Upload the contents from the wordpress folder into your site. This enables the index.php in wordpress to be your main page.
4. Configure wordpress either manually or through the web interface (database name, login, password).
5. You should be good to go. You will have a wordpress site with a login and a password!

Here are a few videos on installing WP.

Sometimes a mistake can be down to a capital letter instead of a lower case one.