A friend has a bird rescue and sanctuary and lost all of their posts and data when their old web site got trashed. So after a long time without a web site they got a new domain. When I heard that I volunteered to help set up the system. As luck would have it they had acquired the new domain from the same host I use. So I was a small step ahead as I was familiar (but not close to being an expert) with that host’s system.

After a half dozen tries of blogging software and themes, they finally settled on WordPress 2.5.1 and the K2 rc6 theme for their blog. Installation went reasonably easy and they happily began posting. After a while I noticed that whenever they posted an unordered list, the bullets were missing from the post.

I  looked at the raw edit for the post and the bullets were there. I can read and even modify a little CSS and PHP, but I am not much of a coder. My first thought was that the problem was a WordPress problem so I went to the WordPress, searched the documentation and the forum for keywords “bullets” and then “lists”. I read all I could, but found nothing that helped. I was even more confused.

So I went to K2 forum and searched there also. There was a little info but it was from a long time ago and K2 had recently undergone a big change. What I read confused me so I wrote a post to the forum complaining about the missing bullets.

I got an explanation from a forum member explaining that the problem was in the core.css.php file. I looked at that file and sure enough there at the beginning of the file was an entire routine for resetting the styles of not only unordered and ordered lists, but a host of other elements also. Here is a link to the originator of this routine. I had seen all this in the file when I was searching for answers and had simply passed over it not understanding what I was looking at.

Now I knew what was wrong, but what to do about it. I continued searching the K2 Forum and found posts with similar issues and the solution given was to create a custom.CSS file. But reading the documentation only confused me more. The issue for me is that most of the people posting are far ahead of me in knowledge and so their solutions are very broad brush and I am still at the point where I need specifics. So again I posted a question to one of the moderators on the forum and he was able to give me enough details to allow me to finally get bullets to show.

So if you also are a newbie and reading this post for specifics, I hope I can now provide them. Here is what to do:

• Locate the folder where you have the K2 files
• In that, find the folder styles/sample
• Copy that folder and rename it to custom
• Now rename the contents of that new folder styles/custom (one file named sample.css) to custom.css
• Edit the file custom.css and in the top comments area insert your name, your domain and most importantly provide the style name custom
• below the comment area insert the following code:

ul {
    list-style: disc;
}

• Save the revised custom.css file
• Now go to the dashboard of your site and select Design and then K2 Options
• Look down that page and find the section titled Style and select the pull down list associated with it
• Highlight in the list the style name custom (this is the name your provided in the comments area of your .css file
• Click the Save Changes button on that page

Note: The name custom is not an absolute requirement – you can give it any name. I don’t know the rules here, but the name probably should be 10 characters or under.

You now should see bullets in your published post.

If you are having similar problems with the other elements listed in the reset procedure, you need to provide a similar solution for those elements also.

The site is changed a great deal in the last few days.  I have added an entire section on Fishing, expanded the section on the State of Jefferson and renamed it Traveling. 

Fishing is now the page you land on when you first enter the site. I intend that eventually Fishing and Travel will dominate the site.

At the same time I now have ads on the site. Having the Fishing and Travel pages as separate sections will help me get ads that focus on fishing and travel related ads.

For my Blog I have always kept each post in its entirety in one place.  To better target the ads associated with a post, this technique will have to be changed – I am working on that.

The problem is that Microsoft and the recording industry want the bucks and will do the least needed to make the most money.  I don’t really blame them too much, but as a result we enthusiasts are left to our own devices.   I have a database for my personal collection, but WMP player knows nothing of it.  I doubt that I am alone in maintaining my own music database.  Because I am not much of a PC programmer, this database was written using FOCUS which is very user friendly.  My knowledge of it came from my days on large IBM mainframe systems.  My version of this software is very outdated and so my database  leaves a great deal to be desired. 

It would be wonderful if there was a common repository for all of the data about a recording.  It should be a repository that everyone could contribute to and that would be assessable to Windows Media Player as well as any other software that wanted to use it.   It would be a collaborative web site for maintaining all kinds of information about a recording and the people that make music.  Here is just some of the information I think should be included.  Someone, please do this.

• Album Name
• Artist Name
• Additional Artists
• Instruments
• Orchestra
• Conductor
• Track Number
• Track Title
• Label
• Album ID
• Opus
• Time (length)
• Recording Mode
• Cover Art Front
• Cover Art Back
• Engineers
• Where & When Recorded
• Reviews (with all of the information about the review)
• Ratings (same as reviews)
• Narrative
• Links to Web Sites

This may have been a good thing because each site had a different way or style of blogging.   So along the way I found some approaches and techniques that appealed to me.    Also, I was gaining knowledge.   To learn more, I began following “Next Blog” tags and began to see hundreds of different blogs each with different templates and each with different content presentations.   I was learning and beginning to understand more about blogging.

A free blog site I tried was WordPress.com.   I had been reading a lot about it and used Google to search for comparisons of WordPress to other blogging software.  Since it was one of those with positive reviews, I decided to try it before several others and got stuck there.  I got stuck because I was mostly satisfied with what I was able to do.  Here I began writing somewhat more in earnest than before.

I also had found Blogger.   Here was another free tool I could use.   Because it was a Google acquisition, I felt that Blogger was going to be around for a long time and would become better and better over time.   Also, I think that it is probably a good thing for me to use two free tools.  I can learn more this way.

However, For a variety of personal reasons, I did want my own domain.  I figured that initially I could blog on it.   And, I hope I can continue to learn and eventually would use a domain for more than a blog.   At the same time what I was reading at various web sites and WordPress forums was much different than I was doing at WordPress.com.   Was I missing something?   Yes I was, I discovered that WordPress.com and WordPress.org were not the same thing.   Cool, I could use the WordPress blogging tool on my own domain.

I have friends that have blogs or web sites of their own and over the years they have encouraged me to learn this or that software.  Each time I devoted weeks to reading and exploring the software they recommended.   However, I could never get motivated enough to actually learn and begin using it.

Now, quite by accident, I had found something I felt comfortable using.  An   important point to me was that it was one of the tools that was well used and well liked.  This meant I could get some help if I dug myself a hole.  I looked around for hosting sites that offered WordPress and had positive reviews. I found many so I flipped a coin and selected BlueHost.

I signed up at BlueHost and got the domain I wanted and began doing some minor things.  But somehow, about a week later, when my IP address got assigned things got screwed up and I could not access my own domain.   It took a while to get to the right support staff.  When I did, they finally fixed the problem.   I got a whole new IP address.  I have not had a problem since.  Well, the truth is I did, but those were of my own creation or because I was making all the mistakes common to new users.  Not just one or two mistakes, but all of them.   I am now a month down the blogging road and am enjoying myself.

Recently, the Windows Live Writer Beta was announced and I began using it and haven’t stopped.   This is a great tool and I now use it for 90% of my posting.   If you have a blog, I encourage you to grab WLW and use it.   While it is still a beta product and I am looking forward to lots of improvements in the next release, it serves my needs very well.

Getting back to the forest; I have a number of links that I click on far more often than my other favorites.  These I put in the Links folder of Favorites and I.E. displayed them at the top of my browser. 

For years I have used a shortened name of the link rather than the long name it gets when you add it to your favorites.   For example, I had shortened the name “WordPress Blog Tool and Weblog Platform” to WordPress.  By shortening these names I was able to get 5 of my most used links to appear in the tool bar.  One click and I went directly to them.

However, I have eleven really frequently used links and to get to the others I had to mouse and click all too frequently.  Then the simple solution finally came to mind.  Don’t use names, a letter or two is all I really need.  So now, this is what my tool bar looks like and I love it.

All that appears now is the Icon followed by a letter or two.   Using lower case shrinks it even more.   All eleven of my links are there with room for more.   If I could get only an icon to show, that would suffice in most cases, but that is not possible or at least if it is I couldn’t figure it out.   I don’t use the menu bar very much so it has been shrunk to just “File”.  It still allows me to see the rest of the menu by accessing the drop down menu.  So now I get three tool bars on the same line and gain space for the actual window.

Learning new software is always a problem for me and many others too.  I read as much as I can and then reread it again later.  But I always miss something or even worse, occasionally I will misunderstand and misapply what I did read.  Until I learn the new software and gain some insight into it, it seems so strange and difficult to use.  I think, “Aliens wrote this stuff”.

Many years ago I programmed in machine language on the Univac Solid State 80.  Then my company switched to a Burroughs computer and I thought this new system was never going to work.  It wasn’t me, it was this goofy system!  But then after programming the Burroughs for a few years, I was reluctant to switch to an IBM 360 and Cobol.  Maybe it wasn’t the goofy system after all.

Obtaining a domain and beginning this blog has been somewhat of a change in lifestyle for me.  Being a Senior Citizen and very reluctant to change has brought me up short a number of times now.

My latest and continuing escapade has been trying to understand how blogs are managed.  All of the PC’s I have used, except for my Timex Sinclair 1000, have been Microsoft OS systems.  First it was DOS and then Windows.  But now I am at a hosting service that employs Linux.  This is all new stuff and so very different from my past experience. 

After signing up with my host, I got my new blog going using WordPress, downloaded the K2 theme, uploaded some photos, wrote a few posts and started getting brave.  I read a lot of the documentation and heavily browsed the user forum.  Screwing up my courage, I then went into the host administrative system, cPanelx it is called.  In it I found the file manager and began to view the files on “my server”.  I found my photos easily, but after a couple days of looking I could not find my posts anywhere.  I was positive they were there with all of my HTML imbedded therein.  What did my host do with them?

So I opened a problem ticket at my host and complained I could not find them, etc. etc. etc.  Imagine my embarrassment when after several exchanges with the support staff I learned that my posts were not in HTML files on my server, they were in a database.  I needed to use a different option, something called phpMyAdmin.  I went to it and began browsing with it and behold, there were all my posts, pages, comments and etc.  Learning is never easy is it?   I fear I will be at this a long time.

I guess one of the reasons for my disenchantment is my personality.  I am not much of a writer and almost everything I write undergoes a great deal of editing.  I rewrite much more than I write sometimes.  More importantly, I really get a kick out of knowing and controlling things.  So just being able to write is not quite enough for me.  I want to see behind the interface and learn a little about how it is done and control my own blog.  The free blogging sites don’t allow much of that, so finally a few weeks ago, I got my own domain, signed up for hosting and here I am.  I am actually spending some money.

Now I have been posting here for a while and I am not totally satisfied with the editor built into WordPress.   I wanted to see if there was something that suited my style better than it does.   I have spent the last week checking out the various client packages for editing a blog.  Once again I am trying free software before deciding to spend my kids inheritance on another toy.  After a lot of reading, I downloaded and tried several editors and have given them up. 

Today I downloaded Windows Live Writer and am writing this post using it.  My initial reaction is positive, but we will see if I like the results.