Thoughts from Stephanie Sexton

Well I am quite suprised, two friends have gotten thier own web sites. My biggest suprise was my ol girlfriend Betty who apparently has taken the time to learn about web hosting, wordpress blogs and is even tackling dreamweaver on her boyfriends computer. I had no idea she was getting into computers, but after a while on the phone I quickly figured out why. Betty has been stuck at home with a broken knee, and her bf has been working three jobs - so she has had quite a bit of time on her hands the past couple of months.

Betty then points out that a girl I use to know, or at least knew of, ya know, seen around school, has gotten her own web site and Candice set up a blog about her wild travels and erotic mischief. That is pretty wild, I am super suprised that she has gotten a web presence outside of myspace, but I am glad to see that other people I had never thought would get a geek streak actually getting into it - the internet has changed so much since I first got online.

Tech Replaces Diamonds As Girl’s Best Friend

Ant writes to tell us that ‘diamonds are no longer a girls best friend, at least according to a recent study commissioned by the Oxygen Network. From the article:
“The survey, commissioned by U.S. cable television’s Oxygen Network that is owned and operated by women, found the technology gender gap has virtually closed with the majority of women snapping up new technology and using it easily. Women were found on average to own 6.6 technology devices while men own 6.9, and four out of every five women felt comfortable using technology with 46 percent doing their own computer trouble-shooting.”

After seeing a friend post with her wordpress blog, I was amazed at how easy it was to get some posting done. I had used movable type and blogger, wordpress seemed like a perfect mix of blogger ease with the advanced features like trackback and very cool plug ins like polls and stuff that I could not resist.
Installation was easy, I did have to do some digging to come up with my mysql databse information, and as to wher wordpress is really easy to use, I reccomend getting a host that will auto install wordpress for you if you are ot one of my geekier friends; there is some technical jargon to get it set up. If you are using ftp already and can get myswl access (a username and password) from your current web host, then you should be able to navigate the set up process easily and be on your way to blogging in less than 10 minutes.
The support, plugins and documentation is well done, easy to find, and most likely any issues that you would run into have already been asked and answered in wordpress’ easy to use forums.
As of this writing I just install v 1.5, and wordpress v 2.0 is out on the web already. After reading some issues about the current 2.0 version I am holding off a abit until the newer version gets more stable and more themes and plug ins / extension become available.
Hopefully the ugrade process to 2.0 will be easier than importing posts into wordpress, which after looking at the documentation, seems a little tricky and possibly iffy.
So far I have installed the plug in that Britney showed me she was using and I am lovin’ it.
I’ll post later about any other developments.