Entering WordPress

SO I INSTALLED WordPress just to see what all the fuzz was all about. And I must say that I am quite impressed. Easy to install, easy to manage, easy to use and very flexible.

For a very long time my webpage had lied dormant because I always wanted to try this and that concept of creating webpages. I am not a web developer of profession, but a natural curiosity have led me to try many things, for then just to abandon the project when all the “hard parts” were grasped.

First I created a simple initial version of my personal webpage using tables and simple html (just as I created any other of my webpage after frames became the big “no no”). Quite boring and repetitive and I quickly lost interest. So for a long time the webpage consisted of mainly “Under construction” notes. I then decided to give css a shot. Now that was interesting. The separation of contents and layout really appealed to my LaTeX mindset. The tables were still giving me a hard time though. It can become quite frustrating to keep track of all those table cells, so finally I upgraded my css skills and abandoned the tables for good – ahh the relief.

Now that I had a webpage running, I wanted to add more exiting things. This led me on, to try out some frameworks found on the internet: PRADO, Zend, Yahoo UI, WYM Style and more. I rejected them all eventually for various reasons.

The last thing I tried was tex4ht. A tool that allows for conversion of TeX and LaTeX documents to html and/or xml pages – sweet :-) This could have been the ideal chance of brushing up on my LaTeX skill’s as well as getting a website completed. The tools is quite impressive, but I could not quite get it to directly produce a decent level of visual appearance without some tweaking in the css output.

I finally decided to channel my experimentations to my other neglected programming projects and focus more on some actual contents for my webpage. So now I think I’ll give web publishing by blogging a try :-)