Fiddling Around

I love my blog.  I know that sounds silly to some of you (and totally normal to others), but working on it brings me so much joy that, even when I’m not writing posts, I still play around behind the scenes.  Right now, I’m really loving a minimal look, so I cleaned up my sidebar a bit.  And then, over the weekend, I tried changing the post format, so what you now see is the entire post, instead of the excerpt and a thumbnail.  I like it for a change, though it involves more scrolling, and I hope you’ll be honest and tell me what you think about it.

When I switched to self-hosting, I chose a free theme from WordPress (like a template on Blogger), and I’ve adapted it very slightly.  It fits my needs currently, but at some point (maybe next year), I’m hoping to do more with the overall design.  The problem is my total lack of knowledge in that area, and I’m constantly working to improve it.

Right now, I’m taking an eCourse via Pugly Pixel, and it’s a great way to learn and practice very basic coding skills.  The class is actually set up for use with Blogger, though some of the techniques can be applied to any format.  Katrina Tan is an awesome teacher (she was one of the instructors in the blog class I took last summer), and she makes everything extremely simple to understand.  And, not that it’s important, but she has a very calm, relaxed voice, so it’s very easy for me to follow along with her at night, when I’m exhausted from chasing after my noisy boys and suffering from sensory overload.  I definitely recommend her classes, and they are incredibly affordable.

While I played with my blog this past weekend, I couldn’t find a way to remove the thumbnails that appeared next to the post excerpts.  I could easily show the entire post, by changing one small word of code, but, even after days of searching and searching, trying and experimenting, nothing worked to remove those tiny pictures.  Finally, in absolute desperation, I posted my problem on the WordPress.org forum, and a very helpful gentleman walked me through the steps to change it successfully.  I admit I was a bit nervous, because, as Ryan says, “coders don’t suffer fools,” and I willingly admit that I know almost nothing about the behind-the-scenes blogging stuff.  But this guy was very patient, and I was able to make the change.

Still, I want to learn to control my own blog, and I’m doing my best to soak up as much knowledge as I can.  I realize it’s a bit bizarre to blog about blogging, but I’m fascinated with all aspects of blogging right now, and I often scroll down to the bottom of blogs, just to check out their themes and designs.

I also think I’ve come as far as I can, at the moment, with any major blog changes, but watch out!  I’m a little dangerous and I’m learning more every day.

Please be brutally honest and let me know what you think of the new format.  If you’d prefer to see fewer posts on the main page, feel free to tell me.  Your comments are important to me and I want to make my blog easy for you to read.