Kontan’s Place

Hello!  Thank you for stopping by, so nice to have you today.  Welcome to my new place.  As many know I have been working on Kontan’s place for a while now. I tried various programs to set up a site and even tried directing Blogger here.  As Sage reminded me when I started this latest venture, that didn’t work too well. As you can see, embarking on wordpress operations turned out OK.

I started looking at wordpress a few months ago.  The school year was so busy and I just couldn’t figure it out.  The summer is still busy, but I figure if I’m teaching from 7:45 utnil 3:45 I’m not bringing anything home so I can spend an hour or so at night working on this.  Only this time, I read the instructions!  If you are considering WP let me stress to you the importance of reading ALL instructions before you start.  It really isn’t hard if you have an idea of what you are doing.  However, if you miss a part of the instruction process it will not work and it will drive you nuts.  That is where my webhost came in handy.

I use 1and1 as my host. Their customer service is pretty good. I have had only one problem with a service call and that was a miscommunication error.  Usually your wait time for help is short. With the right software you can give them visual access to your computer so that they can see what you have done wrong and talk you through fixing it.  I had pointed my FTP to the wrong spot this last time.  With just a few clicks WP was up and going. I host my teaching website there too.

Since you’re here, let  me show you around…

This is the home page where I do the blogging. As you can see there are entry and link categories.  I tried to get all of my links in the correct place.  My post categories include Imports, all entries imported from Blogger, Latte thought, imported posts from Comprehensive Chaos dealing with history and reading, Frappes are blogthings that amuse me, Flavor of the day is the miscellaneous catch all for the day to day posts.

You can also visit the barista page. That is the about me page.  Currently, I haven’t figured out how to point the link to the about me page if you are not on the home page.  Still working on that part. The mi famiglia page is to tell you about the family.  There you will learn about who I have nicknamed what and why.  The espresso page is where you will find a shot of color with photos that I find interesting and pics of the family.  Of course if you have read my site before and wanted to find something specific there is the search feature that will take you to the bottom of the page.  It is most helpful if you are looking for a history post from compchaos.

As you can see there are various features that I didn’t have at blogger. It is also less “busy”.  I love this simple coffe and butterfly look.  The coffee cup came with the template. I added the title and butterfly for kontan flavor.  Since there were butterflies included in the comment template I thought it would be appropriate.  This look is very fitting for me.  Pretty mellow, but has the coffee and butterfly which most who know me would associate with me.  I’m a coffee nut and the butterfly thing just sort of happened.  OH, btw, look up at your URL search bar.  Isn’t that a neat little thing.  That is a favicon, you can create and insert your own favicon.ico here.  Working with the template is similar to working with blogger templates. It uses php instead of html, but if you figured out how to manipulate your html template it is the same process to figure out WP templates.  The help forums are top notch and you can almost always find what you are looking for or someone to point you to it.  I find google searches of what I want and including wordpress in the search usually leads me right there.

I have rambled enough. I allowed myself til only 8 AM to create an entry and it is 6 past now.  Have a great day!