Deborah Woehr

I haven’t been happy with the RSS feed software that I bought a few months ago. If you are a member of WBA, then you’ll know why. I’m testing out a new piece of software that I just found on hotscripts.com called eSyndiCat, which is a directory script.

So far, so good. It has a very clean interface, unlike the software I’d tried before. Even better, it links straight back to the main site. I’ll need to figure out how to incorporate the two, design-wise. As it is right now, I hate the theme on the main site. It looks terrible on my husband’s laptop.

I’m going to have to learn how to build a WordPress Theme. That’s all there is to it. (sigh) And, I’m thinking of doing away with the RSS feed. Your thoughts on that? Do any of you find that feature useful?

Karen confided that she preferred the directory. So, I’m going to create a directory for the members’ blogs. Would you like a directory for writer’s resources as well? I’d like to have both, but am wondering if that would be too much.

My Dunce Cap was extra tall and pointy yesterday because I forgot all about my instructions for upgrading to WP 2.01. I didn’t make a backup, and I forgot to disable everything before I used Fantastico to hit the upgrade link. You can guess the result.

I’d posted a while back about letting The Buzz die because it wasn’t the community blog that I wanted it to be. Mainly, I was the only one posting on that site. So when disaster struck yesterday, I didn’t beat myself up.

It was time to decide whether to keep this blog or cancel my account with my hosting provider. In the end, I decided to keep it and do away with the community feature since I already have that going at the Writer’s Blog Alliance. From this point on, The Writers Buzz is going to be a newsletter, where I will continue to post book announcements, author interviews, and articles about writing and book marketing.

My husband asked me to build him a website for his family’s business. In the process, I needed to update his corporate image, which is twenty-two years out of date. This logo happened quite by accident, as I had planned on a different design. He’s happy with it, so I can consider this part of the job complete.

I’ve tried dozens of CMS programs only to face:

1. Bugs: glitches in the code that range from minor to major
2. Poorly designed interface: most of these open source CMS programs are a bitch to customize. They’re fine if you don’t mind using them as-is. But if you want to customize your layout, you’ll need to know the rudimentaries of HTML, CSS, and (perhaps) PHP and MySQL. Because of Drupal, I now know how to create tables in MySQL.
3. Bloat: Many of these software programs (including wikkis) have more features than I’ll ever use. This can lead to slow load times, which is not good.
4. Poor (or lack of) documentation: Many of these sites rely too much on their forums for support. Who wants to wade through tens of thousands of posts to find the answer to your problem?

I could go on and on, but the above list of gripes are my major pet peeves. I spent a good majority of the time yesterday searching for new CMS’s and found a few free ones. But they were buggy right out of the box.

The commercial ones looked promising, but they were either too expensive or not professional looking. So, I passed and returned to my writing.

Last night, I sat outside and pondered this for a while. For the second time in six months, I thought about creating my own CMS. I’m still thinking along this vein, and remembering the advice of my brother-in-law. Building your own CMS is very hard work.

Well, I’m not afraid of hard work, and I’m certainly not afraid to learn. This sent me to Barnes&Noble this morning for a book about PHP, since most of the existing programs use this. After careful reading of the synpopsises and the introductions, I discovered that I need to learn more about HTML before I attempt to learn PHP.

That was a good thing to find out because I hate wasting time, unless I’m having fun doing it. As far as my knowledge of HTML goes, I know how to format text, paste an image, and hardcode links. I left the bookstore with a hands-on guide to designing webpages with HTML.

Once I learn the ins and outs of that, I’ll graduate to PHP. Then I’ll have to make the choice of tweaking the existing software on the market or creating something that is uniquely my own.

All of my blogs (with the exception of The Writers Buzz) have suffered neglect this past week or so because of this new project as well as the move. This project started with a comment from Clive Allen of Gone Away about helping writers build more traffic for their blogs.

The Writers’ Blog Alliance started from there and has snowballed into a community portal. It’s in the beta test phase right now. I’m happy to report that none of the members who joined today complained of any difficulties with the registration problems.

I’m still trying to smooth out the bugs, which include glitches in displaying HTML code and modules that don’t do what I thought they were supposed to do. I’ll be replacing the job board and the store shortly.

Despite these small hurdles, this project has gone smoother than I’d expected. Or, perhaps I’ve gained some experience. At any rate, I project this community will be ready to launch by the end of August.