poundster.com

Day -23: Time for a technical post. This one is about the blogging program that we’re using to get the blog happening. And it’s a big thankyou to the folks at Wordpress.

My first effort in the blogosphere was bondurbia (now defunct) which used Blogger. All in all blogger was pretty simple to use and, provided your expectations are reasonable, it’s a great way to go.

I’ve chosen wordpress for this blog largely based on Kate’s experience with Veggie Friendly. One of the great features about wordpress is that you can create a number of different “pages” and you can see mine in the left hand sidebar. I’ve used the pages to convey basic information about the project in an easily accessible way.

One click and you can find our itinerary or go to a google map of the locations that we’re posting from. (My intention is to have one flag on the map for each day that we are away with a link to the corresponding post.)

Wordpress also has a great range of downloadable themes with a choice of 1 or 2 sidebars and fixed or floating central column widths. A few customisable clicks and hey presto, it’s not too hard to create a site with its own “relatively unique” look. (Some would argue that uniqueness is absolute rather than relative. These people are pedants. Do not trust them.)

Our blog is hosted by websitepalace.com, which is the site from which I bought the “poundster” domain name, initially to set up our wedding website which we used to convey information to our guests. I am in two minds about having the blog hosted here, but so far there have been no significant problems.

Kate has had problems (some potentially blog-killers) with both of her Australian hosting providers, so perhaps bad service and occasional stuff ups are the rule rather than the exception. Perhaps bigger will be better? Time will tell.