I should have guessed that it would be this hard to start from scratch when you knew pretty much nothing! So late last night, about one o’ clock or so, I’m sitting around and thinking about the fact that I’d been recently asked to take over the www.campusantiwar.net website. An honor, too be sure – but I realized that short of doing some very simple creation in a design course, I knew absolutely NOTHING about managing a website.

So I go to 1&1 and get their basic package and myself a domain name (obviously the one you’re looking at right now, unless someone has deigned to copy and paste everything to somewhere else, which I highly doubt 🙂 ) and their 10GB of storage plan. I figure that should be, um – more than enough than anything else I could possibly need.

Now, obviously, I needed some content. I want to try to do as much of this as I can myself, but when it comes to blogging software, there really isn’t anything better than WordPress (yes, that is my shameless plug for them, since I am using their lovely open-source software) I got that right away. They needed a SQL database though, so thank goodness 1&1 allows you to make those. There were some problems for about 15 minutes, but then I realized that I had forgotten to properly refresh the web database versus the local database (and it took 30 minutes to upload all of the 5MB of local content to the server, sheesh) and I was able to get everything set up, as you can see now.

I like learning to do everything myself, while asking as for as little live help (that is, asking a friend to help me) as possible. I googled around and stuff, and eventually figured out everything. I’m in the process of making this blog site look as close to www.heiseheise.com as possible.

Who knows? Perhaps I’ll be able to put this on business cards someday. Regardless though, this experience (which will last for at least 6 months because that’s how long my hosting is for, and the domain registration lasts for a year) should teach me valuable skills to put to use while managing the Campus Antiwar site.

Peace, everyone! I should probably attempt to sleep…