Moving Forward

I have been blogging here at MacMousecalls for several months now. The process has been far from smooth.

I began the blog using WordPress with encouragement from several of my fellow members of the MacLevelTen media group. I also secured an account at DreamHost to have a home for it. DreamHost is one of the best web hosts out there for WordPress bloggers, but I am not using WordPress right now.

This is far from my first web page. In fact, I helped set up a web site for my children's elementary school back in 1992, and ours was one of the first school web sites out there. In those days I used a text editor and wrote all my own tags. Since the purpose of the web site was to enable the students and teachers to make their own web pages, I used the Mac OS Notepad to hold the common tags used in writing HTML. The kids and teachers would copy and paste the tags into SimpleText and then fill in the content in the middle.

When Adobe PageMill was introduced, I ordered a copy for the school and we were off and running. Over the next few years, I became a master of both Adobe PageMill and Claris HomePage and I taught many professional development classes for teachers so that they and their students could make school and class web sites.

When GoLive CyberStudio was released, I quickly learned that and produced even more web pages and taught more classes. When DreamWeaver was introduced, I learned it well enough to teach it, but stuck to Adobe GoLive to produce most of my pages.

I even learned to produce pages with FileMaker Pro and won recognition for our student-produced, database driven web sites. When Apple Inc. introduced web pages in .Mac, I taught many people how to use it, and eventually how to use iWeb.

Are you noticing a pattern here? I love producing web pages, but I am not a fan of hand-coding!

Unfortunately, what I want to do on my blog requires too much hand-coding in WordPress so I turned to RapidWeaver. Although I am basically satisfied, there are still lots of things I would like to do, but once again, I will need to learn to do some coding.

Since I returned from Macworld in January, I have been avoiding my blog as much as possible. My life is full, I have lots I want to accomplish, and lots to learn in many other areas of blogging and computing. I plan to learn to use WordPress, and perhaps I will eventually move back to it, but the most important part of a blog is content, so I will be using RapidWeaver for now.

I have also been wanting to put a little of "myself" into this blog. When I had the chance to meet some of my readers at the MacLevelTen meetup and at Macworld I found out they wanted to know more about what I am doing, so I will be adding a few personal items to the blog.

I also have several exciting new projects that I am working on, so keep in touch!

Pat