I have been messing about with website development for 20 years now – ever since I first staked my claim to a spot on the Geocities web hosting site.
It was easy to come up with a list of things I wanted to publish back then. What I found difficult was actually getting them online. When I got my first website space, all I knew about online communication came from participation in forum discussion. I had to learn a new coding language called HTML to do anything with a website.
Later on, I got an HTML editor to help with the mind-numbing basics of website coding. But I was handicapped by the lack of good graphics and sound. I have kept my early attempts online as a historical curiosity – not that anyone but me would be interested in such a Wayback Machine.
After a few years of frustration, I realized that my real interest was not in programming but in content. That’s when I discovered blogging.
Fast forward to today, and I have my own domain, a blog powered by WordPress, and a nice theme to present my posts. I also have the benefit of thousands of my own photos to add in. So what was once hard has become rather easy.
I keep all my blog stuff along with the WordPress software in a subdirectory of the domain. That is why the blog’s Web address is https://104vaughan.ca/wp. This is a smart way to do things as it keeps all the working parts of the blog in one place. However, I do need to have a webpage at https://104vaughan.ca so I can serve anyone who arrives there from a search. This particular site is called a “landing page” and all it needs to do is direct web surfers to the blog on the subdirectory. Got that?
When I first located Almontage Blog here in 2014 I hand-coded that landing page 1999 style. It was strictly amateur hour and it showed. The landing page looked terrible on smartphone screens – it was unreadable as well as ugly.
Recently I discovered a free piece of software called Mobirise which looked like a good way to fix up my landing page.
You don’t need to do any coding with Mobirise. A little drag and drop, some typing and mouse-clicking, replacing the stock photo background with one of my own and Badda boom, Badda bing I was done. I just had to save the files to my PC and later transfer them to my domain.
The new landing page is professional-looking, readable on any device and it was easy. What once was hard is now a piece of cake.
To be honest, technology is the least of my problems in blogging today. To blog, you also need to have something creative to say. After close to 500 posts and 17 years, I am sure I have repeated myself many times. That probably goes with being a senior as well as a blogger. But once in a while I get writer’s block. So bear with me.
What was hard is easy. What was easy is hard. And so it goes.
