When you’re setting up your new WordPress site, the first decision you need to make is where your site should be hosted. The primary options are hosting your WordPress site on WordPress.com or alternately, on a different hosting provider using the free software available at WordPress.org (often referred to as “self-hosted”).
WordPress.com:
Unlimited free sites
Custom domains
Free support
No theme uploads, but they offer over 200 free & premium themes
No outside plugins, but popular plugin functionality built in
No upgrades or maintenance
Cannot run your own ads, but high-traffic sites can apply for the WordAds program
No bandwidth caps
Need upgrades to modify design/CSS, remove ads, upload your own audio and video, ecommerce
Self-hosted sites using WordPress.org software:
No limitations on advertising or content
Can modify theme files (and even the core WordPress software if desired)
Can upload own themes and plugins
No limitations on ecommerce
Must obtain own hosting and register domain
Bandwidth/space limitations for most hosting plans
Need to research & install plugins
Need to handle own security, backups
No free support
So which is right for you? If budget is your primary consideration, WordPress.com is the clear winner, in that you can get a site up and running for free. Even with the Premium upgrade, the hosting only sets you back $8.25/month. The support and maintenance by the staff at WordPress.com also make the site nearly worry-free. However, there are limitations since you cannot use your own themes or plugins and have only limited access to theme files. You also must keep the WordPress.com footer and abide by their Terms of Service. Self-hosting opens up a lot more options, notably the ability to upload your own theme and plugins. Furthermore, if you need advanced functionality (for example, membership options, paywalls, special landing pages), if you want to run your own ads, or you want a truly customized site design, then a self-hosted WordPress site is likely the better option for you.
When you need to give a new person access to the back end (Dashboard settings) of your WordPress site, the best practice is to create a new administrator of the site with a separate username and password. This protects your own account information and allows you to deactivate the new administrator account later if you no longer need it.
This can be done in just a few easy steps.
1. Log into your WordPress Dashboard, typically at http://www.yoursite.com/wp-admin (where you replace ‘yoursite’ with your actual domain address).
2. Navigate to “Users” in the left-hand column, and under that, select “Add New User”.
3. Complete the new user profile by assigning a username and password for the new user, as well as a role. For an administrative user, be sure to choose “Administrator.” Make sure you include the user’s correct and preferred email address.
4. Click on button to “Add new user” and the user will be added to your site, and an email will be automatically sent to the address you listed, informing the new user of their account (and prompting them to change their password if you didn’t send it to them).
The yellow square was bouncing along the damp road, dancing in the wind like an autumn leaf.
She ran up to it, reached for it, missed. Close enough to see there was writing, she followed it on its random skips and hops down the street, passing several homes and apartment buildings. Half a block down, she finally caught it.
The ink had run, blurring part of the note, but she could still make out most of it.
She glanced around, at all of the homes on the block, all of the doors and windows shut tight, asleep, unseeing. The post-it must have been stuck to a door or window.
Stuffing it into her pocket, she turned around and walked back the way she came, a tear running down her cheek.
Someone hit your dog. I took him to [unreadable]
nothing they can do. Call me at 523-1[unreadable].
You stumble upon a random letter on the path. You read it. It affects you deeply, and you wish it could be returned to the person to which it’s addressed. Write a story about this encounter.
“If you could zoom through space in the speed of light, what place would you go to right now?”
That’s the question for today’s Writing 101 Challenge, A Room with a View.
This is an easy one to answer: if I could be anywhere right this minute, it would be on an empty beach in Hawaii.
Empty Beach in Kahalui, Maui (photo by Jackie Dana)
I start by wandering around for a while, letting the ocean water tickle my feet as it rushes forward in a soapy crush, and then recedes just as quickly, the perpetual tease of the tides. I’d allow my feet to sink into the water-logged sand as I walked, the softness cushioning my toes. Every so often the waves would play a joke, and while I was lulled into the complacency of ankle-deep cool water rushing over my feet, a stronger wave would push the water to my knees, catching the hem of my skirt, before dashing back into the sea.
I’m one of the WordPress.com staff members assisting with this month’s Blogger University challenge, Writing 101. I’m not sure if I’ll write a post to go with all of our daily prompts, but the first one, a free-writing challenge, sounded fun.
So to start this off, I’m asking myself the question: why do people write, especially those of us whose lives don’t center around writing? And by writing, I mean, creative writing, blogging, writing stories about our lives, and so forth, not emails and support tickets or a report or feedback on a project.
Why do we put words together when there isn’t a purpose or a need?
I don’t know that I have any deep, philosophical explanation for it. For me, writing fulfills a few ‘needs’. I want to share my ideas and communicate to the world, to give form to abstraction. For example, when I started thinking about this post, I was going to write about the dreams I had last night, to make them “real” and permanent. The funny thing was, as soon as that idea came to me, I realized that I had forgotten them. Dreams that were so vivid this morning that I lay in bed reminiscing about them, and other than the tiniest fragments that are shooting through my brain, most of them are gone now. I’m sad because I didn’t write them down and commit them to a permanent record.
So that’s one reason why I write. Beyond that, though, I have this compulsion to create, to explore the world of the imaginary. Much of my ‘free time’ is spent writing fiction, which entails the creation of places and people and events, with descriptions to allow others to ‘see’ them as clearly as they exist in my mind. I’ve been writing as long as I can remember, since I was in grade school for sure. I don’t know if I’m really any good at it in an objective sense, but I can tell I’ve improved dramatically over the years, and fewer of my first drafts need to be fully revised before they can see the light of day.
To me, writing opens up a part of me that is vital and alive. When I go stretches without writing, I feel cranky and out of sorts, and when I hop back into a story I was working on before, it’s like everything balances out and life is good again. I used to think it was because I missed my characters, and to an extent I think that’s still true. There are some interesting people in that world of make-believe, and we often don’t give them enough of a chance to talk to us and tell us what they’re going through.
Beyond the characters, though, writing allows me to transform the ordinary, escape the mundane daily routine if just for a little while. Even when I am writing a blog post like this one, my brain is stretching and I’m living in the world of ideas, rather than cleaning the cat boxes or doing the dishes. It’s a break, a chance to dance and sing and paint the Mona Lisa if I so choose, all within a string of letters on a computer screen. I can do anything, go anywhere, experience anything I choose, while I’m writing.
And then when I’m done, if I wish I can share it with the world, or the tiny sliver of the world that may be paying attention. Or not – at least for the blog, for the writing here, I don’t care if it ever sees a wide audience. If you’re interested in what I have to say, that’s great. If not, I don’t feel like it was a failure. This is my space to say and think whatever I wish, and to let others interact with it if they choose to do so. When I write fiction, the goal is to make something others will enjoy and that will transform them, even just a little, making them think about the world in a slightly different way if just for the time they are engaging with my writing. But blogging to me is like a public diary, a journal of the moment, and if nothing else, I have it to look back upon later.
With all that having been said…. if you’re reading this now, I’d appreciate it if you’d post a comment and tell me, and let me know why you read this post and what you think about writing yourself. Whether you’re a writer or just a reader, what does writing mean to you?
I always encourage people to fall down the rabbit hole.
If you find yourself with sudden inspiration to research something, you should do it. Whether it’s going to IMDB to look up the actor you think you recognize from a guest role on a tv show, or searching on Facebook for your grade school classmates, or looking for a book that’s been out of print for decades, sometimes the very act of searching will teach you something or send you on a path you weren’t expecting.
I’ve spent hours following random thoughts through Wikipedia, Spotify and Amazon.com, discovering publications or recordings I didn’t know existed, or finding out tidbits about former acquaintences that were surprising and sometimes shocking.
This time around, I was watching tv when the name of a character reminded me of someone I used to know. Wondering what had happened to this person, I jumped on Google.
I was wholly unprepared for Google to lead me to a moviestar fandom blog, as there really was nothing more unexpected from this person than such a ‘frivolous’ blog that was easily and immediately tied back to them.
To explain further, I need to provide some backstory on myself and how I know this individual.
Many years ago I had ambitions of getting my Ph.D. in history. I already had a Master’s Degree from another school, but thought my academic quest would end there. When my former employer, UT Austin, allowed us to take academic classes for free, I took advantage of the opportunity. Within a couple of semesters I realized that I had not satiated my craving for historical research. After a couple more years of planning and effort, including an accelerated course in Latin that took us from zero to Cicero in a semester, I was back in grad school.
I took coursework beginning in 2000, and was accepted into the graduate program in 2004. For four years, working full-time at my job and as a part-time graduate student, I worked towards my goal. I read dozens upon dozens of books and articles on obscure topics that faculty said we needed to know, and jumped through many other hoops to meet arbitrary goals. I was pushed in directions I had no desire to follow and to work with faculty whose approach to history differed from my own, but I kept going, believing that in the end, the Ph.D. would open these magical golden doors to academia and allow me to pursue a teaching or research career that would be more fulfilling than the one I had, which was rapidly becoming less of a helper position and more of a petty bureaucrat.
Actually, I’m exaggerating, for I knew even then that a Ph.D. in early modern European history wasn’t likely to open many doors, but I did have hopes that I could do something new and different with the degree. As it turns out, a series of unfortunate incidents ended up saving me from any aspirations I may have held for a career in academia and a political game that involves more back-stabbing than Renaissance Italy. As the rescue came just as I was beginning to prepare for comps, it also had the benefit of allowing me to gain a body of knowledge I cherish without all of the headaches of comps and the dissertation.
The point of this long-winded post is that as a graduate student, I sat in a great many courses and learned a great many things. One thing I learned was that under no circumstances should I, or any of my colleagues, ever consider writing for the mass market. Autobiographies were out. We shouldn’t dare consider publishing popular histories (you know, the kind of books people actually buy, rather than academic monographs which sell only as many copies as there are libraries wanting to purchase them).
And god help us, don’t ever let it be known we might be so much as remotely interested in writing historical fiction. If faculty in the department ever so much as suspected that was why we were in graduate school, we’d be run out of town.
Even then, as a graduate student believing that I would succeed (because I was getting great reviews of my work and putting enormous effort into my research), I took that advice with a grain of salt. Even though I read historical fiction and had a largely-completed novel grounded in medieval history under my belt, of course I would only write serious academically-rigorous work henceforth.
So back to this rabbit hole I mentioned. Tonight I did a casual Google search for the individual who warned graduate students never to write historical fiction, only to discover that they have a fandom blog devoted to a particular individual (who, coincidentally, I also very much like). Moreover, because they no longer hold the position in academia that allowed us to cross paths, they are considering a new graduate degree in writing so they can pursue ‘non-fiction’ writing as a career.
I’m keeping this as vague as possible because while this individual was not one of my favorite instructors, I wish them no ill will, and do not write this post to embarrass them. (In fact, if they ever find this blog post, I’d tell them that leaving that toxic environment was likely the best thing that ever happened to them.)
But all the same, finding their blog, and reading a couple of their posts about their own career, led me to consider a lot of things.
One thing in particular I’m thinking about is the whole concept of advice from our mentors, superiors, or others with authority over us in one way or another.
When such people tell us “don’t ever do X” or “you really should consider Y” it’s probably always worth taking a moment to reflect on their own background and consider their own possible motivations. Are they giving us this advice because they truly care about us, or because they themselves are bitter from their own experiences? Do they make us jump through hoops and dangle possible futures in front of us because they themselves had the same thing done to them? Might they feel trapped by their own life choices and wish they could have other opportunities, and envy their students who have yet to make choices?
And if suddenly finding themselves bereft of the authority and power they once enjoyed, might they sing a different tune?
Back to the advice never to write historical fiction: I’m very happy that while I ‘heard’ the advice in class that day, I never took it seriously.
For more than two decades I’ve been a fiction writer, minus the brief interlude when I was a graduate student (and truly, all history is a bit of fiction in itself, but that’s another post). Even as I heard the advice to never consider becoming a fiction writer, I knew that doing just that was one of my options – and in truth, one of the most appealing options, even then.
Now that I’m out of academia and back to writing, I’m giving serious consideration to my next novel (that is, the novel I will start in November as part of this year’s NaNoWriMo) being, you guessed it, historical fiction.
I have to wonder, though, if the instructor who shared those words isn’t still grappling with their own (bad) advice, even as they seek authenticity in their own life, and wishing that they had chosen a different path.
When you’re setting up your new WordPress site, the first decision you need to make is where your site should be hosted. The primary options are hosting your WordPress site on WordPress.com or alternately, on a different hosting provider using the free software available at WordPress.org (often referred to as “self-hosted”).
The yellow square was bouncing along the damp road, dancing in the wind like an autumn leaf.
