For the past month or so, I’ve been working on this remodeled site. I wanted something that was easily updated regularly because the process of copying and pasting all the code for an update page at the old site was getting tedious. Don’t get me wrong; I love code. :P But I just don’t have the time to put into it to keep it up, if you know what I mean. Plus, I needed a way to easily add my students’ work, since that’s always such a humongous job (now that I give extra credit for it ;) ).
So. . .I had become enamored with WordPress sometime last year, and I tweaked a ready-made “theme” for my husband’s site/blog back in August or September. (A theme is a set of templates that work together to create a site. It’s called a CMS.) I knew, though, that converting mrshawke-dot-com was my chance to create a theme of my very own. And it was.
WordPress uses PHP to manage all of the different templates, though, and all I really knew about PHP was that it had a lot of question marks. Oh, and that it was used in creating forums and gathering information. (Thanks, Nick, wherever you are now…) Well, I can’t honestly say that I know a heck of a lot more about PHP now that I’ve tackled the theme-design process. However, I don’t think I could’ve gotten through it without a healthy dose of (X)HTML and CSS understanding.
Well, I’m almost finished moving everything over. I have the paperwork, which will be called “Resources” here, to go. (But I never got all of that online at the old site, anyways…) I have the “About the Site” page to work on, and there is an “Archives” link in the sidebar that goes nowhere. At this point, I don’t even think I’ll be needing that with this new format.
And I have quite a few new essays to get online, too, ones from the first semester at Langston. (We started second semester almost three weeks ago; I know because progress report time is coming up Tuesday. ;) )
The essays include a good number from our “Hurricane Katrina” assignment. We watched much of Spike Lee’s documentary, “When the Levees Broke,” and I had my students write a fictional personal narrative from the point of view of a Katrina survivor. They created some excellent writing, and I’m glad I have some of it to share!
I think I need to tweak the forms a little more, too. I installed and activated cforms II, which is, shall we say, probably not the easiest first plugin.
Oh, and I have a handful of new Grammar Police pictures! (I made Mr. Hawke lean out of the window in the frightfully swirling wind this evening to take the latest… :P I love him!!)
Soon, very soon… I need to update WordPress with the latest security release; the warning’s on every page of the administrative board. Eek. But before I do that, I’ve got to download the databases and all, and I’m sort of waiting until I get everything done first. Maybe that’s backward; I’m not sure.
Once I get the update done (or maybe before??), I’m going to redirect my domain here. I wasn’t sure exactly how to handle the installation/transfer of information because I didn’t want my whole site to be down, so I made a subfolder for WordPress. When I’m ready, I’ll redirect the domain to this subfolder, and all should be well.
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Most of my teaching resources are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License, which means you can feel free to use them with attribution as long as you don’t use them commercially. If you’re not sure, don’t hesitate to ask me. Unfortunately, I am currently unable to send out my tests and quizzes, but I am hoping to establish a less time-consuming alternative for this in the near future. Sorry!!
