OK, so I’ve been fighting it, but I decided learning WordPress is a necessary evil. Supposedly according to website tech stats WordPress is powering 25% of all websites. I’m not sure if that’s entirely relevant if 15% of those sites are as bad as mine, but I figured if even 10% are decent then it’s probably worth learning.

I use the W3Techs extension in Chrome to look at what technology websites I visit use and WordPress comes up time after time. Some of them are significant players, like a lot of online newspapers and major companies. So here I am, in the middle of the bell-curve, going along with the crowd, jumping on the bandwagon, and flinging myself off a bridge because my friends did it.

Actually, I can see why people like it. It seems pretty nice, and it’s easy to use. To put myself through torture, I avoided the “one-click installer” this time and downloaded a proper copy, un-tarred it, created the MySQL database and user, set permissions, etc. The hardest part was keeping track of all the extremely complex passwords required to keep this monstrosity from getting hacked, because it’s by far the most attacked platform in internet history.

While I managed to get through the install process, don’t ask me how to troubleshoot an existing installation because I don’t know. I finally gave up with the techs on my last site I imported from another web host and said I’d just install a new copy. Were those two how-to guides I had written worth keeping? Probably. Did it seem harder to preserve them than just starting over from scratch? Yes. But that’s OK. I’ll figure out how to troubleshoot this mess some day.

But that is for another day, because WordPress is all about content. Maybe now that it’s set up I’ll actually keep more records of the technical stuff I do. There’s so many laptops I’ve torn apart and bash scripts I’ve modified and rsync OS backups I’ve made that are lost in the ether forever. I do weird crap with Linux and ESXi that I don’t think is documented anywhere yet and I’m sure someone else out there might want to know how to do it someday… maybe…

Or not. But that’s what blogging is all about – the inflated sense of ego. My experience matters, dammit, because here it is, written down, displayed for all to see. Or maybe it’ll actually help someone, which is the true meaning of purpose – giving back to others when we have been able to overcome obstacles they might also encounter.

But not to get too meta, I’m probably just going to write stuff down as I go. No real project continuity I’m foreseeing, as I don’t have much of an attention span. And I’m not really a developer, I just thought the name was cute. I’d like to learn coding but I’m way more involved in doing hands-on tech support and infrastructure projects and they mainly take up all my time. But enough about me, this is really just meant to be a rambling first-post hello thing. I really should stop typing now before I get myself in any more trouble.

Squirrel!!