lorimarsha

Time: Last weekend
Place: Barnes and Noble
Mood: A need to know

Surrounded by thousands of inspiring biographies, novels and cookbooks, I found myself drawn to the section frequented by nerds, geeks, and data-junkies -a safe harbor of how-to’s for those who have abandoned the emotional self-help aisles.

Scanning the titles, I felt an immediate sense of calm. (Even without having read “Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway” or “The Little Book of Calm.”) I felt a small twinge of anxiety at “Twitter Power” and “Photoshop Elements”- two areas of technology I have yet to explore. But when I saw “Building a WordPress Blog People Want to Read,” I realized I’d found my Holy Grail. Finally, I’d learn to master this blogging thing and people would actually read and comment.

I chose WordPress, not for its ease of use, but because I discovered it back in 2005 when I first decided to start a blog. I didn’t do a lot of research back then and knew nothing about Blogger, Movable Type, Blogspot or any of the other platforms. So I sort of felt stuck with it when I decided to reformat my website to blog-based.

But as I read the book, I realize that even though I chose WordPress by accident, I am in the company of The New York Times and Martha Stewart. The author, Scott McNulty provides easy-to-understand pointers on managing the dashboard and extending its capabilities with plug-ins. (A plug-in is just something you can add that creates new features- like linking to my Etsy store.)

I’ve just begun to skim the surface of WordPress’ full capabilities and that’s probably okay. I don’t want to start talking in php-ese and bringing up templates and tag clouds to the barrista at Stell.