This little WordPress experiment ate a morning and spat some of it back out again in the process.
What we have learnt today:
The Chaotic Tortoise does not like widgets.
The Chaotic Tortoise is somewhat undecided on plugins.
The Chaotic Tortoise feasts on time.
My background in programming is limited by professional standards. This is something that has always baffled me as I have always remembered considering programming to be a kind of wizardry, and who wouldn’t train to use magic if they were given the option?
I think part of the reason I’ve never sunk a massive amount of time into the venture is that it can be fairly tedious. There is however something highly satisfying about tinkering away and finding something slowly emerge from the metric ton of bugs inherent to any program. This is something I’ve been experiencing whilst setting up this blog.
I’ve been putting off doing this properly for quite a long time. I’m not saying that anyone hosting a blog on blogger.com isn’t doing it properly, but WordPress is a lot more customisable. With just my basic programming skill set, I’ve managed to tweak this theme into something that I’m quite happy with in a relatively short space of time and now I appear to have the bug for doing more.
There’s a real temptation to just accept the default on what we’re given with computers, but the truth is that they will do anything we tell them to do. Of course, the problem is that they do exactly what we tell them to, like a bloody minded child following instructions to the letter, but so long as there’s a full proof wording behind your instructions, the only limitation on all of this seems to be hours one has to sink into the project.
I do believe this morning that I have managed to become a level 1 programmer with some minor cantrips in PHP and HTML.
Additional Notes:
If anyone would like to use the original theme for this site, it can be found here. I especially like that it has been designed by someone called “techgremlin”. It’s true, all the best blogging handles have been taken.
Greetings. If you are reading this, then you are probably reading the first post of this blog.
A brief introduction: My name is David Hing and you are currently a visitor in the realm of davidhing.com. This blog is the blog of David Hing.
I am a writer of sorts. The accurate description would be a “struggling writer” who is really struggling to write. I still have a day job in insurance administration, I have an academic background in Ancient History and more recently Law, an obsession with games in board and video format, an increasing fascination in programming, and an on-again-off-again relationship with creating comics.
Chaotic Tortoise breaks down thusly: Chaotic refers to my critically short attention span with any single over-arching project and a tendency for my mind to wander far and wide when I’m trying to get anything done whereas Tortoise indicates that I tend to work on my own personal projects rather slowly. The way I could really prove this is by waiting six months before making another update, but I’m not that committed to making that point.