I'm a Dot Com, baby!! After many hours and days of working on creating a website, I've done it!
I would like to introduce to you: www.aLupieExistence.com
*fanfare, trumpets and 76 trombones*
What's the big deal, you ask? Well, seeing as though I didn't know til recently what a host server or domain was, I have through much trial and error, given birth to my online baby and what a labor of love it's been!
Initially, I created a website using Homestead. I'd used them before to design a website for my brother's 1-man music band, Independent Playground, over a year ago, so I was familiar with their process. They provide you a template and after I clicked on everything in their Sitebuilder, to figure out what does what, I'd built a neat little website. So using them again was my first instinct. I spent a couple of days adding text, pictures, nipping and tucking here and there until I was pleased with what I had done. "Now what?" I thought. This webpage would cost me about $10/month to keep it active and I didn't know what purpose this site was to serve. Suddenly frustrated with myself for being so quick to act before my Lupus fogged brain could catch up, I looked around at other peoples web pages to see who they used.
I checked out www.FeliciaFibro.com and saw that she had turned her BLOG into a webpage! "Huh? You can do that?" I thought. So, I went to Wordpress to see what they had to offer. There, I found out that I could turn my blog from a blogspot.com to a .com for about $17 per YEAR!! I was seriously annoyed now! At $10/month, I'd be spending $120/year! I'm no accountant, but $120 going out every year and $0 coming in is a HUGE problem! So, I signed up with Wordpress for free to check them out. Maybe they offered better templates and more interactive website thingys than Blogger did.
I spent hours re-building my blog with Wordpress and even learned how to transfer over all my blog entries from Blogger before I realized that I had already invested years of work with my Blogger account and to start over now was CRAZY! I'm half-way to 40 and I have Lupus AND Fibro fog to contend with! Who am I fooling? This old biddy would prefer to stick with what she's come to know. So, I abandoned that project.
Days went by as I laid on the couch exhausted from the energy I'd expended trying to understand the elements of web design, host servers and domains. My little red Netbook lay on the table nearby completely neglected for days while I zoned out on mindless television replenishing mybrains' reserves. Refreshed after a few days of BravoTV, I picked up little red and went back to work.
I looked at the web pages of a few of the blogs I already follow like www.chroniclysilly.com, www.hersilverlining.blogspot.com and www.amessyhappiness.com that have well established pages and I got a few ideas from the way they did things. I created a logo and a banner from scratch using the Paint software that came with my computer and copyrighted them. Then I learned that I could use Homestead to "host" my website and "point" it to the blog I'd already been using for years, and then copyrighted that! Once again, I got boggled down in terms like HTML, DNS, CNAME, A-records and a host of other things that were as foreign to me as an exotic language, when low and behold, I'd done it! My blog that used to be a blogspot.com is now a .com and it will only cost me $15 per year to keep it going!
*curtsy...curtsy...bow...bow* Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much.
So, what is all this for?
I don't know.
My brother Mike, the successful entrepreneur of the family told me it'd be a good idea. Something might come of it one day...but I'm not sure what. I know this though: Whatever it is, I'll be able to tackle it even with the Swiss cheese that I have for a brain!
