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The Trouble with Being a Renaissance Woman

bloggingI have run into a little snag with my blog. I am trying to cover too many subjects and so find it difficult to submit the blog to be included in sites. I guess, that is the problem when your interests are all over the place rather than limited to just a few.

So I am trying to figure out how to solve this problem. My main website is called Marlies' Creative Universe for exactly that reason. When I started it in April of 1997 it was manageable, but now after all that time it has grown to humongous proportions and is more like 5 websites in one. On top of it due to the amount of traffic I am generating and the fact that I am using TYPO3 as CMS the site literally crawls. That is not good for visitors, as they have to wait for the pages to load.

So temporarily, I have solved this slowness problem by making most of the pages static rather than dynamic. It helped, but I still will have to figure out a way to improve this on a permanent basis and that brings me to the problem of switching to a different CMS.

TYPO3It took me a year to figure out how TYPO3 really works as most of the tutorials were written for programmers and not lay people. That experience has lead me to discover that I am great at tutorial writing by taking 'geek talk' and explain it in plain English.

After using Blogger now for almost a year, I like the ease of use, but not for a website of my site. I looked into Drupal, but that was even more 'geeky' than TYPO3, so I scratched that off the list. Currently I am immersing myself in Wordpress and think I will go that route. The problem I have with Wordpress is learning to understand the templating system better and figuring out how to translate my TYPO3 experience to Wordpress.

You might ask why I don't just go and pay somebody to help me? Well, that is not my style. I am totally self-taught with computer stuff and like leraning at my own pace. Yes, sometimes it would be great to have a mentor, but taking official classes or paying for help is a no.

I have found some Wordpress templates that I like and even figured out how to install XAMP on my computer so I can test locally, but sometimes the themes don't quite do what I want them to and then I have to do some more research and that is time consuming and progress is slow.

So my next step is to create a blog for each of my main interest and link them to that section of my main website. I hope that it will make it easier for visitors to subscribe to a blog that is more narrowly focused. This blog will stay, but focus more on my thoughts and interest that don't fit into a neat category.

Does anybody have any ideas how I could approach this transformation differently? I am open to input and would love to hear from you.
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Comments

marliescohen said…
Thanks for your link. I will check it out.
March 29, 2009 at 7:04 PM
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