Tag Archives: WordPress

New personal blog for MichaelQ

Double Pepperoni, Geek

Very happy to launch this week my new personal blog.

I’ve had the blog MichaelQuinn.com.au for many years and never really been sure what to do with it. Do I use it for posts about my family, or use it as a general blog for anything I want to go on about?

Obviously there is different audiences for both – direct family members just want to hear about Eliza, and not necessarily about the latest widget. Other friends might want to see what I am interested in – but could care less about what Eliza did last night that was sooooo funny. I know – bloody “Breeders”.

So during my work-break over Xmas 2009, I decided to split things up – the bleeding obvious after years of indecision. My old blog – MichaelQuinn.com.au will be particularly directed at friends and family who just want to keep up with what myself, Fiona, Eliza and Jhett are up to. This new blog – MichaelQ.com.au will be my “personal” daily blog for whatever stuff happens to come along. I’ve also set up Down Under Geek as my tech blog – it’s been around for a while too but hopefully I’ll be using it a bit more in 2010. We’ll see.

I’ve learnt a lot about WordPress over the last 7-10 days. Looked at probably 100+ designs, narrowed that down to 30-40 to try out before eventually ending up with 2-3 designs I really liked for this site. This design was the first one I tried – and the first one I discard initially. But having experimented with a couple of others over the week I came back to this one for its style and simplicity.  I’ll have to do one of those “Top 20 Plugins for your WordPress Blog” posts soon – got some nice ones helping me out here.

This blog will be a combination of “point to” other posts I find interesting, plus some of my own thoughts and ideas. Hope you can sign up for the ride.

Site install update.

Double Pepperoni, Geek,

So far so good.

Been pretty happy with the progress so far. Very happy to find a theme that easily lets me add site URLs in a Nav Bar across the top of the site.  For what I want this site to be – a hub or many other sites, it’s ideal.

Been going through a lot of my old plugins that I had saved from other sites. Most of them didn’t make it to this one. Instead I have been going through several articles written by people smarter than me about Top 10 Plugins for WordPress, First 10 things to do with a WP blog etc. I’ve gone thru half a dozen or so of these and picked the best bits from each one.  I’ve now got a nice core of around 20 plugins – a few related to SEO which I haven’t turned on yet but I will.

I think I will probably end up writing my own Top 20 WP ideas – once I go thru a few more installs.

Main problem I have been having is getting Feedburner to work. Well feedburner works fine, but getting WP to deal with it properly seems to be a bigger pain than expected. Google seems to have fucked up quite a few links that would have been handy – it’s redirected them to a generic Google Groups page which imo is probably the most useless thing Google offers.

Yes I said typed fuck. Get over it.