Online Grandma

Archive for the ‘How I Did It’ Category

Image via WikipediaAll day I’ve been working on rearranging my various blogs and sites. I signed up for a second Reseller Hosting package, this one with ResellerZoom. (The first one is with HostGator.) The reason for this is the old “eggs in one basket” philosophy. Also, I now have a couple of pieces of software that need a cPanel on the hosting package to work.

For the past couple of years, I’ve been dabbling with internet stuff so that I’ve ended up with hosting here and hosting there, and there’s been no plan or system to it. I’m consolidating everything onto these two Reseller Packages in a nicely organized way. (That’s the plan anyway … )

However, it’s easier said than done. Today I’ve been pulling out my hair trying to move a WordPress blog — this one, as a matter of fact. (Here’s a little side note for anybody thinking of starting a blog … Pick out the host you really want before you start. It’s a royal pain to move it later.)

Well, enough of that. The real purpose of this post is to test a service called “Zemanta“. In order to see how it works, it’s necessary to enter a bit of text into your blog’s editor. When it has enough to figure out what you’re talking about it starts giving you suggestions.

There’s a sidebar to the right showing relevant pictures from Flickr and articles that it finds from … wherever (?) At the bottom, there are links and tags that I can apply with a click.

Cool! I just clicked on one of the more relevant pictures, and — just like that — there it is in my post!

Guess I’ll see what happens when I click on one of the articles. Here goes … Okay, it places the link in a “Related articles” box at the end of the post. For each article, there’s a little “visit” link so you can check them out before adding them. I suppose one ought to do that. I’ll stick another one in here so the first one won’t look so lonely.

Next, we’ll experiment a bit with the links it’s suggesting. It’s found ten things to make links of in this post so far. You can check the links it comes up with to see where they go, and use them or not. Seems that mostly they go to Wikipedia. For the sake of this experiment, I’ll choose the “Apply all” selection. It very helpfully provides us a definition of “philosophy” and information on the meaning and origin of the term “eggs in one basket”.

Well, you never know … People frequently don’t know what the heck I’m talking about.

To finish up this test, I’ll also apply all the tags suggested without changing them. This has been fun. Even marginally helpful. I’d recommend having a look at it.

After getting this all set up in QuickBlog, I’ve changed my mind. I think I’d be better off with WordPress. It’s more complicated, but also more options. Apparently you set it up from the same screen where we set up Joomla earlier. (On the GoDaddy hosting account Control Panel, it’s under “Value Applications”.)

The thing I don’t see how to do right off the bat is how to get my domain switched from the QuickBlog.

One other thing to consider — I guess you could make a blog on Joomla, since I’ve decided to learn that program. Maybe there would be advantages to just learning one software.

(Evening)

I’ve spent most of the evening and afternoon reading about WordPress. The next thing will be to figure out how to change the blog over from the other one. I think maybe that will be done by just canceling that blog, and then … (?)

I’m installing WordPress (WordPress 2.0.4) to my practice domain. Here’s what it wants:

1. Admin Username
2. Admin Password(10 characters max)
3. Admin Email
4. Blog Name = (?) (Wonder how hard this will be to change later?)

OK. Setup is pending. It takes it a few minutes to install, then it’s ready to go.

The time has now come for me to start taking some kind of action on my
internet projects. It’s quite confusing and actually scary. I’m not
sure what I want to do … nor how to do it even if I did know what I
want to do.

My idea is that, for now, I’m learning the mechanics of all this. So
financial results are not the main consideration.

They say you should decide on your approach and then concentrate on it.
But at this point, I just don’t feel like I have enough information to
know what I’m going to do — ebay? create a digital product? affiliate
marketing? public domain publishing? something I haven’t even
thought of yet?

Well, it boggles the mind to get too hung up on all that. So for the
moment, my objective is to create a blog and get Adsense on it. Then my
next objective is to create a webpage using Joomla and figure out how
that works.

I’m not even sure where to start … The blog I have in mind will be a
continuing record of a rather clueless non-techie’s journey to a
position of making a living online. I was searching for available
domains the other day and the name I came up with was
“onlinegrandma.com”. Haven’t registered it yet. (more…)