Now that I have my blog up and running, I wanted to talk a little bit about the experience. If you are anything like me, you want your blog to be an accurate depiction of who you are. It should mirror your tastes, your aesthetics, your ideas. My previous attempts at setting up a blog on blogger didn’t take, as it never felt like my own. This time I decided to host my own. So after setting up my [tag]Wordpress blog[/tag] (which was a breeze thanks to the control panel provided by my host [tag]Go Daddy[/tag]), I set about trying to make it my own.

The first thing to do was to find a theme. Wordpress is really cool in that it provides a very open framework by which to customize the look and feel of your blog via it’s [tag]wordpress theme[/tag]s concept. This is a complete contrast to the experience I had with [tag]MySpace[/tag] (see my previous post, “Extreme Makeover: MySpace Edition“). And the number of themes available out there is enough to cover all tastes. At the minimum, it is enough to get you started.

So I proceeded to troll through the various theme collections that were out there.

The Wordpress dashboard sent me to the Wordpress.org themes page that had links to a few websites that got me started. But nothing I found there quite gelled. Just to get going, I ended up selecting the “[tag]Neo-Sapien[/tag]” theme by Small Potato. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted, but it was cool, and worked for now. The image is a little silence of the lambs, but I put in my own anyway. That was my first go.

But it wasn’t exactly what I wanted. So a few days later, I started messing around with it to see if I could mould it into what I wanted. That’s when I discovered the real power of the [tag]theme editor[/tag] (Your Wordpress dashboard -> Presentation -> Theme Editor). If you know some HTML and CSS, and can understand enough to copy-paste the php macros, the theme editor allows you to modify the files that make up the theme in order to change the appearance of your site. You can make little tweaks, apply the changes and see what the effect is. That gave me quite a few hours of fun. And gave me the germ of an idea about how to make this blog my own.

Look for my next post on this topic, as I talk about how I came up with a theme to my specifications without doing all the work of creating my own theme from scratch.

[tags]Tech, Web 2.0, Blog customization, Blog skinning[/tags]