I mentioned to my wife last night that I might set a blog up for her. There are a number of reasons, but the main one is that we live in the Shoalhaven and the rest of the family is in Sydney. We aren’t a long way from them but it is a 2½ hour drive, so we don’t see them as often as we used to.

One way to keep in touch is the telephone – and it gets a fair workout. The other common way these days is email. But to stay in touch with a lot of people you can’t beat blogging.

Of course, you have to be careful what you say, but my wife is pure as the driven snow and so she isn’t likely to say bad things. And blogging gives her the chance to say what she wants and allows her family and friends to do the same. Unlike emails or telephone calls, everyone can join in. She has friends overseas whom she sees rarely and so they can be included. Who knows, she may meet a whole lot of new friends online.

There are thousands, or is it millions, of blogs in cyberspace. Most of them would seem like the most arcane gibberish to anyone who wasn’t associated with the blogger. But that doesn’t matter, those people needn’t read it. But for those, often few, people who are interested it is a great way to keep in touch.

I had previously used WordPress v1.2 on another site and I wanted to see what v1.5 was like. So at 8:00 am today I uploaded WordPress to my site’s server and using the default theme I had a blog set up within an hour.

It needs work. We won’t keep the default look, and I have to do some work to make sure that all the pages validate. They probably do but once you install some of the plugins like Markdown to make it easier for other users, then you have to do some tweaking.

I knew WordPress was good from my previous experience, and it is the weblog software of choice for many well known and experienced bloggers. I’m not sure where it rates but I would imagine that along with Moveable Type, which seems to have suffered some bad press lately with its change in licencing, it is up the top of the list of popular blogging software.

And I wasn’t disappointed with this latest version. The install was smooth and fast. There are a couple of new features, like static pages, and it just does the job.

There is enough documentation to enable you to change the PHP code if you need to, and if you need further help there is always the Codex which has a wealth of information.

The only PHP I changed was to show the calendar, the rest runs straight out of the box.
WordPress is styled with CSS. I’m not sure if this was available in v1.2 or not, but in v1.5 you can edit the style sheets from within the admin area of your site. If you were doing a major change I would suggest coding outside and then uploading the changes via FTP, but for small changes this is a boon.

However, I fell into a trap. It was so easy to change that I opened the style sheets in Style Master, my CSS editor of choice, and wondered why the changes didn’t take effect. Of course, I was editing the local style sheets. Moral – make sure you have the required level of caffeine in your body before undertaking anything technical.