5 Comments Written by dmeemai on July 22, 2008 – 9:29 am

When I finally made the move from Blogger to Selfhost WordPress in late December last year, I took a leap of faith that I could do it! I knew nothing about terms like HTML, CSS, FTP, MySQL databases, cmod, php, MyAdmin, .htaccess and plugins. But I was committed to learn them.

Once settled, I could not believe how much was in store for me in my new ‘home!’ It seem to have opened a whole new door of interest for me- coding. While I’m in the very least NOT an expert of it, I think I know enough to get me through creating decent sites for me and for my other undisclosed network. I still don’t get most of it and I think I’m only lucky getting things right by trial and error. Still.

I now understand why “code is poetry” in WordPress. The infinite usage of loops, strings, quotes, tags, divs and ul-li is almost like metrical forms in verses that means something imaginative and that creates beautiful results.

My first WP theme was Helios, very basic and simple. A good start off point along with OrangeSense at my other site, The Postcard Collector. About the same time I started blogging, I also created a homepage for a small Restobar I co-own in the Philippines named Tatay Pepe’s. It was an even simpler design and there was nothing much to it at all. I finally got sick looking at it and decided it was time to reinvent the website.

The hunt for a theme was on and I found a great one in Arthemia theme. What a premium quality template given away for free! But that’s not even the amazing part. It’s the designer! Free as it is, he patiently takes time answering each and every repetitive questions regarding install and coding. He is almost at the beck and call of every blogger who decides to use the theme!

It took me 2 days to have the site up and running! It was a pain to install only because my knowledge to WP coding is still limited yet I didn’t need to disturb the theme creator! I managed to decipher everything myself. I’m loving the whole process of discovering something new with WordPress- unleashing its power and pushing its potentials.

Just over two weeks old in WordPress, on to my new theme- it jumped from 9million or so Alexa rank down to 1.3million Alexa ranking! Impressive! It did manage to have a PageRank of 2, ten months after I bought the domain.

Just over two weeks old and it is already nominated for Filipino Blog of the Week over at a fellow blogger’s site who is an ‘authority’ himself to blogging. Kindly Visit Tatay Pepe’s.com, stay awhile and vote for the site please… Would you also let me know what you think of it?  

Tatay Pepe’s is my poetry at the moment.