General

Step 1: Blog what you enjoy/know/Love

It’s time for a new blog for myself, and this one is really for myself. I’ve been cooking a lot lately and I’ve been wanting to keep track of the recipes I’ve changed. I enjoy doing blogs so I thought I would create a recipe blog for myself.

I’ll be blogging here about my steps for setting up this personal recipe blog.

I’ve done blogs in the past on subjects I thought would make money rather than what I really enjoyed. They didn’t make as much money as I thought and I did not enjoy it as much as my blogs where I was enjoying myself. And I make more money on my enjoyment blogs, not my reach for riches blogs.

Step 2: Use WordPress

The second step to starting a blog is choosing which blogging platform to use. I’ve already got this step covered for myself because I researched and even read several books on blogging a year or so ago. If you have not made up your mind trying to choose a blogging platform can make your head spin. I choose and am still pleased with the WordPress blogging platform. I like the flexibility it gives me to make a unique blog.

Step 3: Use the Theses Theme

The next step for me is having a way to control all that flexibility that WordPress uses. I’ve done coding before and know you can get into the guts of WordPress but I really don’t want to spend my time doing that. I searched, researched, tried and tested lots of WordPress themes. Themes are written so a non-coder can get to the flexibility of WordPress without having to do the coding. It is an interface with WordPress.

After lots of looking I found the Thesis Theme for WordPress. I’ve watched as this theme has matured into a fantastic interface for WordPress. In fact, I have not even used the latest release. I’ll be blogging about my experiences with the newest release here on this blog as I create my recipe blog.

I’ve got my head in the clouds over cloud computing. I realized how many systems I rely on fall into that category. But what is Cloud Computing?

Computerworld Magazine defined it like this:

Cloud Computing describes a system where users can connect to a vast network of computing resources, data and servers that reside somewhere “out there,” usually on the Internet, rather than on a local machine or a LAN or in a data center. Cloud computing can give on-demand access to super-computer-level power, even from a thin client or mobile device such as a smart phone or laptop.¹

I’m using Cloud Computing or hosted infrastructure services for hosting, email, documents, site statistics, bookmarking and template design.

I’m hosted on a grid cluster system² that expands and contracts as I need bandwidth. If I have a spike in traffic from everybody reading this Stumbling this then their system will handle it. If I was hosting this myself, I would never provide that kind of flexibility.

You knew I was going to mention Google sometime so I might as well do it now. I’m using Gmail and Google documents. I used Eudora for over 10 years and really enjoyed it for email. However, the computer(s) that I used to run it from home broke down. When I got a new computer, it was easy to switch to Google because of the recent pain of loosing the computer. Now a crashing computer will not take away all my emails. Gmail has a long way to go to be 1/2 as good as Eudora for the Mac. There are a hand full of features I really miss but being able to access my email from any computer connected to the internet far outweighs the disadvantages.

I’ve started using Google Documents and for me, a one person operation it is just fine. While the experts say that cloud computing for the enterprise is several years away, for small operations it is here now.³ I have over 50 documents in my Google Docs and I can search and find them so quick it seems like they are on my desktop. That is the promise of hosted infrastructure services.

I used to use Google Analytics but I have switched recently to Woopra for understanding my website statistics. I could download my raw data files on my website and crunch the numbers myself but what is the fun in that? I can now get Woopra to keep my stats for my site just by putting a bit of code on my page. Best yet, the Woopra team is working to make their statistics package better, not me. Look for a comprehensive review of Woopra from me in the future. I’m still taking notes on the program.

Once again, I lost all my bookmarks and favorites when my old Mac and PCs died. Now I keep my bookmarks and favorites on StumbleUpon. If you use StumbleUpon, PLEASE Stumble this article now. (Sorry, blatant self promotion) I keep my bookmarks on StumbleUpon, others use del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, Google Bookmarks, Yahoo! My Web, Yahoo! Bookmarks, Windows Live and others. Notice the “ShareThis” at the end of this and every article on my blogs. All you (a user) has to do is click that and it makes it easy to bookmark this article.

I’m using WordPress as the controlling CMS (content management system) for my blogs. They allow users to modify parts of the code to control the look and feel of the blog. If WordPress upgrades the changes could render all the changes useless. That is why I am using the Cloud Computing or external control of a special theme called Thesis. The Thesis designer created a special page for me to make my changes and any future upgrades to WordPress will not affect my design. By using the Thesis theme, I do not have to spend my time or resources trying to keep up with the evolving WordPress.

That is how I am using Cloud computing right now. But why is it named Cloud Computing? Russell Kay for Computerworld helps us out.¹

Why a Cloud? For years, in a flow diagrams and PowerPoint presentations, people have respresented the Internet as a fuzzy cloud with communications lines going in and out of it. Now that they’re actually talking about using a remote, black-box approach to computing, the old familiar cloud seems an appropriate metaphor.

Utility, grid or cluster computing has also used the cloud metaphor. My hosting at MediaTemple is on a grid computing system. The Woopra statistics program is hosted on the Layeredtech utility grid computing system. The Google hosted infrastructure services are also on a grid system.

As hosted infrastructure services mature, enterprise will slowly give up control and put their documents and systems up into the cloud.

In the cloud
HP, Intel and Yahoo are only the latest companies to look to expand their cloud computing offerings. Other vendors making news recently include:
- VMware New CEO Paul Maritz said July 24 the company will look to create virtual environments for cloud computing infrastructures
- Red Hat and Amazon Announced June 17 the beta availability of the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud
- IBM and Google Launched the Academic Cluster Computing Initiative Oct. 8, 2007 to help students and researachers plant the seeds for large-scale distributed computing.⁴

1. Russell, K, Cloud Computing, Users can hook into the power of ‘out there.’ August 4, 2008 Page 25 Computerworld Magazine [↩] [↩]
2. MediaTemple is my host. https://www.mediatemple.net/ [↩]
3. Ferguson, S., The Future of Cloud Computing, HP, Intel and Yahoo team up to crate large-scale infrastructures August 4, 2008 Page 24 eWeek Magazine “While analysis say that true cloud computing is anywhere from five to 10 years away, this type of infrastructure holds the promise of saving money and resources by allowing businesses and universities to offload some or all of their IT infrastructures to a third party and allow for software to be delivered through the Internet. [↩]
4. Ferguson, S., The Future of Cloud Computing, HP, Intel and Yahoo team up to crate large-scale infrastructures August 4, 2008 Page 24 eWeek Magazine [↩]

Update Update Update Update

This update has just come over the wire:
Yancey has been blogging for 17 days and this is what has happened so far.

Read Book: Problogger: Secrets for Blogging…
Bought domain names and installed WordPress
Started studying WordPress
Learned WordPress uses Themes as templates
Researched then bought Thesis theme
1st Plugin, Plugin Central
2nd Plugin, Security Scan
3rd Plugin, BackUpWordPress
Customized Thesis
Added Feedburner
Upgraded to NEW Thesis release
Customize Thesis and WordPress more
Made my first official Color post

Mom watched as first post appeared. Top Blue Blog’s first post is it’s Welcome page. I was talking on the phone with my Mom yesterday and we were discussing the blogs. I didn’t quite have the graphics ready but for fun, I posted the first Top Blue Blog while she watched from her computer in Oklahoma. I had the graphics done a little later and called back so she could see the changes. She liked the color squares and the blue fish.

Blue Fish, Blue Water

I found a great blue fish to use in the creature paragraph. I searched Google for “blue fish” and I kept jumping to the last of the group of search page results. About 600 pages deep I found the picture Blue Fish, Blue Water. I contacted the photographer, Tony Chammond, and he gave me permission to use his image. Yippie! Tony is 61 and lives in Bexhill-on-Sea, east Sussex, Engliand. To see more of his pictures, click the fish on the Top Blue Blog Welcome page.

I adjusted the image for my uses including flipping the image and fading it into the background color of the Top Blue Blog. [click to continue...]

I need to set the feed address while installing the theme Thesis. I’m setting up the feed through Feedburner. I you do not know Feedburner, you can follow along as these are the steps I go through to set up blogs.

Burn a feed right this instant: [click to continue...]

FTP, File Transfer Protical allows you to move files from your computer to another computer like your server on the internet. I liked the Plugin Central plugin because now I didn’t need to ftp plugins. Fine. Until I started uploading my theme.

There were a couple of dozen files to upload. My ISP has a simple ftp file upload but it is one file at a time. Ouch. I tried to find another program to do ftp. I tried a plugin for Firefox but I could not get it to work right. I tried a plugin, My FTP, for WordPress but it was just good for one file at a time also.

I downloaded CuteFTP but I could not get it to work either.

I remembered I had Dreamweaver from another project and but did not have it loaded on my computer. I now have and am happy to report that I can now FTP with ease. It will be nice to use Dreamweaver for editing the php files rather than the notepad app that comes with windows.

Now that I have DreamWeaver running, I know what my problem was with those other programs. Just as well, Dreamweaver offers more than just FTP.

The color has hit the web! I’m here.

This blog is the recording of the web log of working on this blog and my new Top Color Blogs.

Today I bought this domain, TopColorBlogs.com, along with these domain names:

TopBlueBlog.com TopRedBlog.com
TopGreenBlog.com TopOrangeBlog.com
TopYellowBlog.com TopPurpleBlog.com
TopBlackBlog.com TopWhiteBlog.com

I needed advice so I called my friend Rockie Gaddie. We had a delightful conversation as always and he was able to guide me in the direction I needed to go. We discussed my concept and before I could write this post he had already submitted a guest article on the color Blue and it uses in Reiki. Rockie is a Reiki Master and runs the Reiki by Rockie blog.

I have opened WordPress 2.5.1 on all the domains and I am excited about changing the basic design. I feel like a kid in a candy store. I did have one problem that my hosting company, MediaTemple.net helped me fix. During that time, I worked on the logos for the sites. I will include this one below as it is not yet above. I know Rockie wants to see it.