After four weeks of registering the domain and three weeks of setting up the blog, I have finally managed to slay the demons of PHP and Wordpress, which were bothering me with some real complicated codes. Of course, if you choose to run a Wordpress installation with minimum customisation, it is one the simplest programmes to run. However, as a novice in PHP scripting, I found it extremely complicated to customise the blog in a way I wanted to. Having said that, now when I look back at how I have struggled in these past four weeks to solve the minor bugs I had in my installation, it seems like it was all simple. It’s just that I didn’t know where to look.
Initially, I had issues with Permalink, which is basically a permanent link for every blog post. Having a customised permalink allows the blog to have unique SEO friendly titles, while providing a permanent link to the post in the blog. However, enabling permalink for the blog turned out to be a bit of a nightmare as the htaccess file refused to allow permalinks. I tried every possible tutorial and code available for word press on htaccess, but nothing seemed to work. Finally, I did the simplest of things which was a result of my frustration – I deleted the htaccess file. Voila…it worked wonders.
Next up, was the issue of justifying text and lines between paragraphs. Although editing CSS files is fairly simple, editing a CSS file for a PHP installation is a bit complicated. PHP uses smarty tags and CSS files are created in such a way that it responds to these tasks. However, having little knowledge of smarty tags, I had to add or delete every line of the CSS file and test it in a browser before getting it right. During this process, I messed up numerous times which explains why all my posts show a recent date instead of the dates corresponding to when they were posted. I also had to delete the installation completely and begin fresh for five times in these four weeks.
I guess I have finally managed to sort all of it and my blog seems to be in shape now. But during these last four weeks I have slept and woken up thinking about how I could solve the different issues that kept cropping up. Now that its up and running, expect some quality content…Watch this space!
