Crossing boundaries with your web site
Recently, I began building my personal portfolio site on my own domain at http://wilhaslup.com.
I had started a personal blog on Tumblr.com earlier this year mainly because of it’s ease of use, “Configurability” and features AND it’s lack of branding like blogger.com and some other blog sites. Tumblr.com also offers you the ability to use your own domain name, has a large community of users, and it facilitates the potential for your posts to go viral via other users ‘reblogging’ your posts on their blogs within the community.
My personal preference for site building these days is to use Wordpress both for it’s features and ease of expandability. While many host on Wordpress.com, I see it as a priority to host my own Wordpress installation within my own server account for reasons I’ll cover in other entries.
After constructing a custom theme for my domain, my goal became to visually integrate my domain on my server with my blog on Tumblr.com. This required me to be able to
1.) adjust my server records to direct traffic appropriately
2.) change the navigation bar function in Wordpress with plugin
3.) port my Wordpress theme and use code on Tumblr blog
I’m sure for some of the less technical, your eyes have glazed over by now, but this really isn’t as difficult as it sounds.
For the first problem, Tumblr allows you to use your own web address based on a URL you own. It requires you to make some edits in the “A” record on your server account and to edit a setting in the Customize area of your blog settings. You can find instructions for how to do this on using custom domains on Tumblr here. For my purposes I’m using blog.wilhaslup.com as the address for my blog so that’s what I had to add to my “A” record. You can do something similar or name it anything you like as long as it’s based on the domain name you own and are using for the rest of your site.
The Wordpress navigation bar adjustment is accomplished using the “Page Links To” plugin in your Wordpress installation and adding the link in the area at the bottom of the edit page for the page you want to redirect. You can find and install this easily from within your Wordpress admin are by selecting the “Add New” section under “Plugins” and searching for “Page Links to”.
Porting your Wordpress theme takes some familiarity with editing HTML, but isn’t terribly difficult. Tumblr provides details on using Tumblr codes within a custom HTML theme at http://www.tumblr.com/docs/custom_themes.
If you’ve installed your theme on your Wordpress site, you can simply ‘View Source’ while looking at one of your pages, ‘Copy’ and past into ‘Notepad’ or some other text editor. Your going to want to make sure you’ve installed the plugin mentioned above first, and configured a page for your Tumblr blog so it shows up in the navigation bar and you’ve edited the link area at the bottom of the edit page for that page. You must use a text editor and not a word processor to edit HTML to avoid the software adding all sorts of codes and things HTML can’t have in it. You need something that will save a .txt document.
Looking at the code for your sample Wordpress page you should be able to easily identify the content of the page, i.e. the title & text information on that page. Your going to remove that information and be replacing it with the Tumblr codes so Tumblr knows where to put your blog posts. Once you’ve looked over Tumblr’s code documentation, enter the codes for the various kinds of posts along with dates and any post navigation you may want to include. Now you’re going to follow their instructions and add you ported Wordpress theme by replacing what’s in “Theme” tab once you’ve clicked the Tumblr “Customize” button.
Once you hit ‘Save & Close’ your Tumblr blog should look identical to your Wordpress installation as well as sharing it’s navigation. Your Tumblr blog posts should show in the content area and your server should handle directing traffic between the two, i.e. blog.yourdomain.com & www.yourdomain.com, seamlessly. From the users point of view there’s no indication they’ve gone to another server.
Benefits: Your blog exists within the Tumblr community and posts can be ‘reblogged’ within that community. Your site navigation crosses to your own server where you have more control of what you can include on other pages.
Negatives: None that I can think of.
I wrote these steps down pretty quickly so if anything is unclear please post comments and I’ll respond to clarify or edit the post. If anyone has other thoughts on how to increase viral potential of their content please mention them for everyone’s benefit.
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Why “Genius” & “Talent” are dirty words!
Why is there a cliche that creative people are tortured or unstable, or that they must suffer to do what they do?
There are a few words that describe a way of thinking about creativity that are particularly pernicious and debilitating.
Two of these words are “genius” & “talent”.
In some ways the perpetuation of the negative impact of these words is provided by many creative people and institutions. The words are useful as marketing tools, making the artist a rarity. While things and people with something to say, and advanced ability are not always plentiful it’s not enough of a reason to pay attention to someone. Plenty of really smart people never did anything. Plenty of highly skilled people squandered every opportunity they came upon. Using those two words to market someone or their work is a ploy that plays on the insecurities of others.
The impact of the use of these words in creative circles that is most destructive is how much it impedes those who are growing into seeing themselves as a creative individual. This perception of some as talented or geniuses and not problem solvers and working on things each and every day makes it difficult for students and novices to make an attempt. Once you achieve some level of success you’re still in this position of constantly comparing yourself and your work to some unattainable standard of greatness.
This kind of “frame” around approaching anything creatively can be and is sometimes debilitating, hence the cliche of the tortured artist always striving for something out of reach.
The thing is, any of the seriously successful and many of those we think of as examples of creativity didn’t spend time even considering their own “genius” or “talent”. Rather, they were looking at the market, the climate of their times, or their own passion for ideas.
If you spend all your time trying to convince others how good you are or trying to be something others expect of you, you’ve already lost.
Create what you’re passionate about. It’s all you can do. It’s the most you can do and it’s enough.
Please add your own insights. thanks.