When I started this blog back in March 2005 it was done purely for the purpose of keeping family and friends up to date whilst on a volunteer assignment in Papua New Guinea. In those early blogging days I predominantly published content and had no idea what was happening under the hood.
With time, my focus has slowly shifted from writing content to getting my hands dirty. This blog has gone through several incarnations: from schilt.info to trupela.com – from blogware to wordpress – from Robert&PNG to Trupela Tok – from the K2 theme to a WP framework called Hybrid News theme – from being totally ignorant about how to go about building a websites to now having a reasonable clue. Although I’m still committed to churning out about five posts a week and will continue to do so – my passion nowadays lies in the building, design and customisation of the site itself.
Occasionally I catch myself thinking: “Content is a necessary evil” – to others and perhaps most site owners – the primary purpose of running a site or blog is to publish and share content. Not so for this cookie… nowadays I have to roll out from under the bonnet and almost force myself to get that post out. After all, if all I did was fiddle and not write content – who would come and visit? People drop by from time to time to read the stories and couldn’t really give two cahoots about what was happening below the surface.
Although 25 years in the IT&C business – when I started blogging, I had no idea what HTML was or what it looked like. Faced with the desire to improve the readers experience right from the start – slowly but surely I chipped away at learning and teaching myself what it is that makes a website go “tick-tick-tick”. It wasn’t until I stumbled across WordPress and started the arduous process of migrating posts from the old format to the new that the passion and means really kicked in.
I wrote a post a while back titled “10 Ways that WordPress has changed my life” (10 things) which clearly demonstrates the passion (or perhaps obsession) that I feel for WordPress. Here’s an excerpt from that post written back in August 2008:
1) It’s the last thing I think about before going to sleep and the 1st thing on my mind when I wake up of a morning.
2) My sleeping patterns (or non sleeping patterns) have changed drastically – I now have to force myself to go to bed of an evening (or early morning) but getting out of bed has never been easier! (See #1).
3) WP has given me the tools to extend and expand the way that I share my uniqueness as a human being and individuality with the world.
4) I have lost interest in going to the rugby on Sundays and would much rather stay home and “Wordpress”. (Papua New Rugby is a must by the way).
5) It’s the highest my ISP and phone bill have ever been. (In Papua New Guinea dialup and timed calls remain the primary means of connecting to the Internet.
6) WordPress has allowed me to create websites using a blogging framework. (See website for Goroka General Hospital at http://www.ggh.org.pg).
7) Unfortunately, I have lost interest in sex. (My partner is starting to wander what the heck is going on and thinks I might be seeing another woman!).
8) I used to think that SEO was an acronym for a company executive.
9) It’s now only a matter of time before I develop my 1st WP plugin or WP theme (need to learn some more CSS and PHP first) and have started to question why we only have 24 hours in a day!
10) Have started to experience envy towards folks with easy access to WordCamp gatherings. I thought of perhaps organising a Papua New Guinea WordCamp but to the best of my knowledge there are no other self hosted WordPress bloggers in this part of the Pacific.
Somehow there’s always something to be done under the hood. My list of things “to do” never seems to get shorter. I once compared blogging to “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance“ – roughly the same as owning one of those old British Motorcycles – always needing some maintenance or other. The thing is that the Triumph, BSA or Norton enthusiast does so for the passion and love of it. For me it’s the same with WordPress – a process of never ending improvement.
tingting bilong yu…
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