I finally decided to bite the bullet and give some concerted attention to filling in some of the "standard" background material I have been contemplating for the site. I’d done some earlier work pulling together bio and mission material; I spent most of today (and productively so!) completing those items and some of the other linkage glue.
I’m pretty pleased with the near-readiness of the site for at least initial release. I have to make the plunge and just do it, and then see how exposure and a "live" environment require new efforts.
I remain very disappointed with how difficult it is to compose in a free-flowing manner without having to worry about formatting and HTML. The WYSIWYG editor I’m currently using is not available to both posts and pages, and copy and pasting between environments does really screwy things with respect to word wraps, picking up (or not) embedded HTML (if it doesn’t, it requires pretty painstaking editing).
But, all in all, good progress. I’m quite close to releasing, but may delay somewhat with a week of business travel coming up next week. [As noted elsewhere, this actual post is one month out of sync from the actual release date.]
Author’s Note: I actually decided to commit to a blog on April 27, 2005, and began recording soon thereafter my steps in doing so. Because of work demands and other delays, the actual site was not released until July 18, 2005. To give my ‘Prepare to Blog …’ postings a more contemporaneous feel, I arbitrarily changed posting dates on this series one month forward, which means some aspects of the actual blog were better developed than some of these earlier posts indicate. However, the sequence and the content remain unchanged. A re-factored complete guide will be posted at the conclusion of the ‘Prepare to Blog …’ series, targeted for release about August 18, 2005. mkb
