I’ve thought about the whole domain name ownership, self branding, blogging for quite some time now but this is my first actual attempt.  After doing a lot of research I’ve decided to follow the norm and use WordPress as the CMS since it seems to be the most popular, configurable, and most well documented.  Which is very important since I don’t know php at all.

So far in this process I’ve learned how to set up wordpress (multiple times), as well as the extra fancy special awesome WordPress MU (multi-user) for sub domains.  Although I think I’m going to revert back that since it isn’t doing what I wanted.  What I wanted you ask?  Nothing too fancy or special, but something I can’t seem to figure out at this time.  I wanted each category I created to create a sub domain.  I originally found a plugin called Wp Subdomain but it doesn’t seem to work anymore and isn’t supported any longer from what I can tell.  I’ve checked the authors website and none of the new versions of it seem to be able to do what I want.  *sigh

(Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining about him not keeping this up to date.  That is my own personal fear with any project.  The upkeep as the world changes.  Implementing user requests.  Making it compatible with the new stuff.  Pain in the butt.)

My new, and current setup, lets me have the custom menus I wanted to break the things down into categories/URL and I think I’ll eventually be able to deal with it.  My wish is that I could modify the URL to follow the actual taxonomy of the categories as I have them setup, without the word “category” appearing in the URL.  Some day I may get this.  Who knows, it may be theme dependent.

Speaking of themes…I’m still auditioning them and thoroughly scouring the net looking for the perfect one for this space.  (too lazy to create my own right now) Ideally it would have custom header, custom menus, possibly a way to switch the header based on the category (not sure if that is even possible), and be able to support adsense.  Anyone help find that perfect theme?

Adsense.  Oh goodness.  I’m also trying to figure out how to integrate google adsense and analytics into this site.  Thankfully I found a nice read about how to integrate the two together google accounts together and hopefully Ill have that working shortly.  Hopefully the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin does what it is supposed to and help me get this all installed and integrated easily.

Well that explains the direction I’m looking to take this thing at this point.  I’ll be curious to see what happens over the next few weeks and months as far as design and usage of this goes.

-Puttzy

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