So, in setting up my WordPress blog I experienced a lot of feelings, all of which were on a continuum that looked like this:

WOW, easy as pie <—————————————————————————–> %#@!

Some of the easier things included the really basic stuff like adjusting background color location of things like sidebars and widgets.  A little less easy but not really difficult was picking out a theme that I liked.  I went to the WordPress themes, and then searched under the Install Themes tab (I just experimented with this).  I tried out a few and finally chose “Custom Community 1.8.9.1 by Themekraft.”  I really liked this theme because it allowed me to have photos that were in my blog, or any photo I wanted, to represent that blog post, and then show it at the top of the page in a moving banner kind of set up.  The only part that I had difficulty with was figuring out how to load the picture that served as the the representation for that blogpost, so for a while my blog was looking very unfinished.  As silly as it sounds, I was feeling pretty frustrated at times trying to figure out what I was not doing.  I figured it out eventually (YESS!), and it was really as simple as clicking on the “Set featured image” at the bottom right of the page:

After this, life was a lot better.  I just made a few adjustments with the width and some fonts and I was good to go.

As far as installing the widgets, I didn’t have too much trouble.  Jim had warned us about having problems with putting a Twitter widget in, and I did not have this problem, which actually worries me that I have the wrong twitter widget on my blog.  It was also very easy to get the plugin, “subscribe to comments.”  I’m not sure if it’s supposed to show up on my blog at all? It says it’s activated, so I’m trusting that it is working.

I realized that I had not set up Akismet properly (I activated it, but did not put in the API key. Herp derp.)  So more recently, I activated it, then went to set up an Akismet API key (there was a link in the plugin description).  Here, I created an account with them and they emailed me my API key.  I got it, I went back to the plugins page, and clicked the second link in the Akismet plugin description called, “Akismet Configuration” page.  I copied and pasted the key from my email (they sent me the key very promptly), and I was good to go.

Google Analytics is where it’s getting in the &*@! range… I do not know what I’m doing on this one.  I’ve downloaded 2 plugins (1.  Super Simple Google Analytics & 2.) Google Analytics).  I Googled “google analytics” and found that I should probably create an account.  So I did.  I put in my blog web address, my accounts all set up, EXCEPT that it says “tracking not installed.”  I go in and add my Tracking ID to the plugin settings for the simple google analytics.  The Tracking ID was found on the Google analytics website.  I think I am supposed to copy and paste some html code into my site, but I don’t know where exactly… I will have to temporarily put this on hold.

I also set Jetpack up.  I found it to be a little confusing at first (the instructions on the DS106 site said that we could use the API key from Akisme, but I didn’t see how that was possible).  I had to figure out my WordPress account information, but after I did, it was pretty easy. I will continue to mess around with that.

That’s all for now!