Why This Site?

I was a system administrator for an academic department at WPI while I was in gradual (sic) school for Fire Protection Engineering.

While supporting hardware and software on unix boxes, macs and pc’s I was also doing research on firefighter intervention.   My plate was full, but I enjoyed it.  I did have a tendency to tell users to RTFM quite a bit though.  This is something I need to do myself now that I’m learning WordPress, and I’m having a bit of trouble getting around to it (kind of serves me right).

I intend this blog to be a sort of diary of what I tried to do (good things) and what happened in the process (good and bad things) of learning WordPress.  I tend to do most of my publishing in the middle of the night, so the consequences are usually fixed by morning.

My sympathies are with the people who administrate CUNY Commons.  They have also had to deal with the consequences sometimes.

Some bad things I’ve done so far:

  1. Deleted my namesake site permanently (hey, it was an accident, and I didn’t know it was forever – but I didn’t read the warnings either)
  2. Found out how to post my blogscroll (it’s in the widgets).
  3. Subscribed to RSS feeds to the FT and NYTimes for the entire CUNY university site (needed a widget I already had access to – didn’t need to install a plugin – removed it quickly – fixed it really fast at 5 AM – hope no one noticed).
  4. Purchased some books from Amazon on WordPress that all seem to repeat what the online help already says.  In other words I need to RTFM and forget about the books.

Some good things I would like to try to do:

  1. Use WordPress as a content management system – CMS (something I need) and more on wordpress as a CMS.
  2. Try to use Markdown (I’m a plaintext kind of person).  Need the plugin though and I don’t have access to it – not one CUNY supports out of the box right now.   I clearly don’t have permission to install it myself (apparently it would require a reinstall of WordPress for the whole site – and giving me permission to do that would be bad given my current state of WordPress knowledge).  They (commons@gc.cuny.edu) have said they will install it during the next update – very responsive to my request.  I am pleased.
  3. Put together a FAQ I can manage easily for another site – with or without a plugin (see #2).
I’ll add any other info as blogposts, but you get the idea…

 

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