A Kauai Blog

As you may have noticed, this blog got a makeover and now looks all neat and pretty. Nothing fancy or outlandish, just enough green to match the content. Mahalo nui loa (thank you very much) to my wife Sonja for figuring out how to change things in WordPress and for creating a good layout that hopefully displays the photos well in all browsers.

If you do see any layout quirks, just leave a comment on this post. Thank you.

For those of you who want to know more, the power behind a blog is that writing a post is as simple as visiting a website and typing in a box. The blog software or the blog service turns your text into a dated and categorized blog entry and presents it nicely to the world. As Sonja did for me, you can then change the masthead and the page layout to suit your needs or your fancy. Readers then access a single URL to see your latest entries or to navigate and find older entries. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is another feature of most blogs, but I’ll cover that in another post.

You have the choice of installing blogging software on your own website or using a blog service to manage your blog for you. A blog service is the simplest and quickest way to blog if you don’t want or need your own personal website. There are many easy-to-use blog services such as LiveJournal, Blogger, and WordPress.com. It’s as simple as creating an account on their website and then just start blogging on the personal page they give you.

For my Kaua‘i Blog, I preferred the flexibility and control of managing my blog configuration on my own website. After registering a domain name with Network Solutions and paying to have it hosted at 1&1 *, I download the free WordPress.org software, easily modified some files, and uploaded them to my hosting provider. To run WordPress, you need access to a MySQL database, which most hosting providers include. After that, you can blog with the default layout until you have time to personalize your page, or until your wife takes pity on you and does it for you.

(*) Note that most domain name services provide hosting and vice versa, I have separate ones as a result of promotions. It might be easier and not much more expensive nowadays to go with only one for both services.