First official post

Finally, JonoCono.ca has arrived and is live and fully functional.
My first official post of many!

I started this project only three weeks ago and have spent many nights up until four in the morning (including during the week) to get this up and running. I started out by designing my poetry site first, I was almost finished and then ran into a coding problem that was making the pages jump in the browser window when loading so I scrapped it and started over. I like how it looks now, it’s pretty tidy. My blog was the most complicated and required most of the work, it uses PHP of which I’ve never worked with or used before. Needless to say I’ve learned a lot, with a long way to go still. I’ve spent probably close to a hundred hours on it, installing code and features, making changes while learning how the code and features work, implementing different things, with lots of testing and design. Being a perfectionist isn’t easy, and no the site is not perfect by any means. I will say though while doing some code research I ran across a website that stated “It’s harsh to say it this way, but it’s true: if you don’t know what you’re doing, stop. Don’t implement code you don’t understand”, I pause for a moment to chuckle…I set up this site by doing exactly that, implementing code, changing and tweaking, adding and deleting code I didn’t understand…doesn’t look so bad does it? Don’t ever let someone tell you you’re not smart enough to figure it out on your own.

A little history on how I got started on this project. I’ve had my own domain name (jonocono.ca) since last Oct. upon arriving back in Canada from Cuba. At that point in time as some of you know I had only put up pictures and info and videos regarding my trip. Since that point in time the domain has been stagnant, with little use. It was my aspiration to have a permanent site, something I could add to, change modify etc…but would always be around. Enter blogging; this past Jan. I was reading an article in Reader’s Digest about a woman here in Ottawa who’s been blogging for years etc. I took a look at her site and then tons of other blogs and thought that’s a great idea. Inspiration abounded. Don’t ask me why I didn’t think to do this earlier, blogs have been around for years. I enjoy writing, photography and under the right circumstances creating poetry, now my website rolls up all three into one site with distinct sections for each. With that in place I have excuse to write and often as well as a place to display my photos and poems.

With what I’ve set myself about for the past three weeks I have made some sacrifices. My back is killing me, sitting at a computer for 16 hrs a day, 8 at work and then another 8 at home, suffering from major carpal tunnel, totally sleep deprived, my eyes are about as glazed as crispy crème donuts, and my brain is overloaded with code. Speaking of code, on WordPress.org they have a tag at the bottom of the page that says “code is poetry”. Is it ever, I fully agree!

A week into this I decided to set some sort of deadline for myself to complete this, I settled on March 15th and I’m happy to say I met that deadline and met it fully. It’s not one of those Corporate deadlines that are never met, you know the kind (well, it’s kinda done but this doesn’t really work and that’s not finished yet, maybe next release)…It’s done! I’ll sometimes add a feature or make small changes, nothing that will ever degrade the functionality of the site.

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