Ok, so I think I’m turning into a blog nut… I’ve been looking at tools, utilities, plugins, etc… for a number of reasons, mostly ’cause its fun. I’ve finally come to the conclusion that I need to go “pro” at this – what I mean by that is to sign up with a hosting service, manage my own site with a professional blogging tool that I can customize to my needs and personal preferences.

So what I’ve found to date is that I’ll be building this site over the next two weeks (and last two weeks – I’ve already started) and getting it off the ground. This weekend has been one of learning some neglected (by me) web language technologies (XHTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, WordPress layouts, etc…) that are crucial to getting the site I really, really want to publish to the world.

My page layout and site design is mostly complete, I’ve got a site & domain name picked (I’ll post about that later), a hosting service identified, at least a temporary theme picked out that I have customized somewhat (check out my WordPress blog for a taste). One thing that I would really like is to be able to design a theme that really fits what I want to display for “style”. I’m not a graphic designer, or an artist – at least not skill-wise, I DO have opinions as most of us do.

One goal will be combine my two existing blogs (here at blogger, and my WordPress.com blog) into one. Though I will keep the two blogs I have, they will likely play a different roll which I can’t think of at the moment. What I have learned from both these blogs are some interesting things, for one – they both are drop-dead simple to get started, which is excellent because that means more people can start a blog without needing to understand the underlying technologies. They are both also very powerful. Blogger at the moment is more customizable right away, WordPress.com has only been available to the public since I think Oct 2005 and is a bit more controlled at the moment making customization unavailable right away – though Matt Mullenweg is working on this for future options (Go Matt!).

Well, there is much to do even though its a good start. I’ll post more information soon – maybe a few screen shots of things here and there as well.

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