Category: The Journey
The Journey – Knowledge, Skills & Confidence
| November 24, 2011 | Posted by OS Wayfarer under The Journey |
My last post about “The Journey” briefly described the re-development of the OS Wayfarer website – an ongoing exercise. The other focus has been to gain the knowledge and skills, and ultimately the confidence to write, format and market an eBook.
As I have mentioned before, I am on a journey – a transition to retirement – from full-time consultancy in international development assistance to becoming a writer about project monitoring and my increased holiday travel. I felt I had basic business-writing skills to support this new direction, but not necessarily adequate travel writing skills. I had spent many years researching, developing, writing and submitting tenders, but were these the skills I needed? I decided I needed to do some training.
Fortunately, I discovered the Sydney Writers’ Centre. Over a period of some 10 months I completed quite a few courses which helped me figure out what skills I possessed and what I needed to learn. The courses I completed were:
- Professional business writing (gave me confidence in my existing skills)
- Writing for the web (provided a good insight into the nature of writing for the web)
- Magazine writing stage 1 – online (very useful course that provided a broad range of skills)
- Travel memoir (really challenging course – caused me to rethink my writing future)
- Sell your eBook on Amazon (really good overview – too short)
- Travel writing (really enjoyed this course and it restored my confidence after the travel memoir course)
The Journey – Website Re-development
| August 2, 2011 | Posted by OS Wayfarer under The Journey |
The task of re-building the OS Wayfarer website has begun in earnest. In the past it had been used for a different purpose and was built using Joomla!. So I started the redevelopment using Joomla! but I had some difficulties: first it was sometime since I had used it and so I had forgotten what little I had learnt; secondly, Joomla! has recently been upgraded and so all the modules were still being upgraded; and I had to increasingly annoy my son every time I needed to get something done. So I decided to change platforms. It was unfortunate, as Joomla! is quite powerful but only usable by the committed.
So I turned to WordPress. At first I installed WordPress using Fantastico on my host server’s cPanel. This installed version 3.1 and I had a lot of trouble with memory errors. In the end I manually upgraded to version 3.2.1 which wasn’t that difficult – I just followed their guidelines. I initially used the Twenty Eleven 1.2 Theme but found it quite restrictive after having the flexibility of Joomla!. So I searched the WordPress themes and settled on the Clear Line 1.0.7 theme.
This theme has a lot of options hence flexibility. So I am working with this theme for the moment. I’ll see how it goes.
