Deepwire's Blog

Well, as you may have noticed, not much has happened here in the last few weeks, I have just been too busy with work to do anything.  Now I’ve got a bit of time free around work, so may start looking at something to do here other than the blog.  If anyone’s got any ideas that would be great, as I really don’t know what else I want from my website at the moment.

I’m definitely keeping the blog on here, and the theme, decided after looking through the WordPress gallery that I didn’t like any of the other themes any better than the Pixeled theme I chose on day one.  So it stays, and the blog will be updated as and when I do things to the website.  A lot of it still baffles me, my last website (10 years ago) was so simple in comparison.  Everything was HTML, I remember adding a visitor counter with no problem, and had multiple pages with graphics and midi music playing on some pages – back then that was advanced!  Now there are soo many new things, PHP, Flash, Java, xHTML, MySQL databases, Ruby, Perl, etc etc and very little of it makes sense to me at the moment!  Once I have decided what I want to put on the site, then I’ll be able to work out what features will be needed and hopefully be able to learn how to use them to create the content I want.

No guarantees on how long it will be before I actually do anything here, given that I still have other more important work to focus on.  The website is really just something for fun, to do in my free time, while hopefully learning something that will be useful to my career in the long run.  Please drop me a line on blog@deepwire.co.uk if you’ve any suggestions for the types of content I could include on my website, and what I would need to do them too if you feel like it 

Recently, I decided to delve in to the internet for the first time in almost 10 years, and registered my own domain.  Choosing the domain name took a considerable amount of time, and in the end came about after someone online misread the nickname I was using.  For some reason, it stuck in my head, and suddenly I had my domain name.

Next came the more difficult decision, choosing a web hosting provider, for the main reason that I did now know what features I would need, the amount of web space or bandwidth would be suitable, or even, as once asked, if I would need a Windows or Linux based package.  While the difficulty in choosing a domain name was down to my own (lack of) creativity, this difficulty was down to my lack of technical knowledge about web hosting.  Fortunately I had some help and was soon able to short-list some providers, all offering similar features, but at varying prices.  I was even able to demonstrate cPanel in a couple of places which helped a lot, as I knew that this would be useful.

In the end, I found a company offering Linux based hosting with unlimited hosting space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited sub domains, unlimited SQL databases, unlimited e-mail addresses and a long list of features, some of which I understand and some of which I don’t.  The price was reasonable too, 2 years of hosting for under £48, which was the factor that pushed me towards them over some of the other companies I shortlisted.  The company chosen, HostClear is part of a larger company, Just Develop It, with their data centre in America, but UK offices and support based in Hampshire.  While this did originally put me off, it seems that most hosts, even offering pricing in GBP, are just UK offices of larger companies, with very few data centres actually in the UK, and with hosting on these costing considerably more.

So here I am, now with both a domain and a website, and very little idea of what to do with, but knowing that I want to try different things and learn all about web development, as it seems to be a useful skill to have these days.  Although I have never blogged before, I thought it would be a good idea to start one, and give me somewhere to write about my experiences developing my website, and really, just messing about with the internet.  Obviously that presented another difficult choice, which type of blog do I want to use?  After asking a couple of people and receiving the same almost instant unwavering answer, I installed WordPress, a simple and painless process, far easier than I thought.  I was even able to install a new theme from the WordPress site without any trouble, although I may change this a few times in the near future once I have explored a bit more, until I find one I am comfortable with.  Who knows, it may be that I end up back with this theme, as I do quite like it already.

Now, I’m trying to work out what I want to do with my site, what I would like to put on it or use it for.  I may create a personal page, with some information about myself, the work I am doing, things of that nature, or I may not, at this stage I don’t have that many ideas.  But whatever I want to do with, the point is for me to learn about web development, how things work and what different things mean or do.

Check back over the coming weeks/months to see what I get up to, if there are any developments on the site, or just new blog entries, as I have fun trying to figure it all out