Help available here! (Photo by cogdogblog on flickr)

Well, mostly just improved.

I had been getting pretty frustrated with some pieces of this site that weren’t working. There had never been an RSS feed, the comment form was broken, and so on.

So, I hit up the very friendly people at the WordPress help desk at Northern Voice this weekend. Not only was the help free, but it was nice. No judging when I introduced the problem to each subsequent person as:

Sorry, I built the site myself, so it’s probably not done right, and I probably can’t tell you how I did it….

Miss604 gave the first crack at it, with some tips on plugins that might work better for me. Then Digital Entomologist Lloyd Budd took it on for hours, looking for where I hid a wee bit of code that he figured was messing things up. He eventually did, with a little help from Scott Leslie, and now the feed works.

Thanks all! I also learned a lesson: plopping code somewhere to make the site look prettier just might be breaking it.

This site is built using the blog tool WordPress. If you’ve never heard of it, neither had I until I went to Northern Voice last year. (Besides all the WP evangelists, founder Matt Mullenweg was the keynote speaker.)

The funny thing about WordPress is, it looks pretty user-friendly. The site is clean and conversational. It advertises a “famous 5-minute installation.” But then there is also this ominous warning:

If you have no idea what to do with this download, we recommend signing up with one of our web hosting partners that offers a one click install of WordPress or getting a free account on WordPress.com.

I had no idea what to do with that download.

I went ahead anyway, but got scared off for most of a year by language like PHP and mySQL. I can happily say now you don’t need to know what that means to install or use the tool.

But it takes way longer than five minutes.

The rest was comparatively easy, although I found most bits I tried to add didn’t work the first time either.

These worked (and thanks be to their developers!):

• PrimePress as a theme, with an easily customizable header. (Others I tried said they did, but my pic never fit well)
• cformsII as a contact form. It’s not listed on the WP site, but others didn’t allow for the styling I wanted.
• Twitter for WordPress to show my Twitter feed. Others looked weird. I’d like to style this one more too, but that would take some fumbling about.*

It’s a work in progress, and if anyone has any tips let me know.

* Fumbling is required because I don’t know css, I just work it by changing the style sheet, seeing what I break, and going from there.