(The Nintendo Girlfriends’ Guide to Gaming post will be up as soon as I get the photos from the girls at Brand About Town. I took very few of my own, as I was too busy gaming and chatting.)

I met a fellow blogger at my Nintendo party the other night! For the purposes of this particular post, she shall remain nameless. We got to talking about – what else? – blogging and the act of moving one’s blog, as I did recently. She confided that she’s moved her blog several times, and one of those times the move was prompted by some Mean People.

There’s a common conception in the blog world that when you start getting trolls, spammers, and the occasional negative “you suck” sort of comment on your blog, you’re on the right track to “making it.” People are noticing you. Your URL is getting hits from bots because it’s getting hits from people. They’re annoying, but in the grand scheme of things, the spammers and bots and trolls kind of mean that you’re moving on up. So we deal with them through Akismet and other filters.

But we should not have to deal with Mean People. Mean People attack us personally and use our comment sections as a place to spew venom and say hurtful things to the person behind the blog. Mean People don’t care if their comments are moderated, they just want to put their vile thoughts on the blogger’s screen so she has to read them before she can delete them.

Mean People need to go back to MySpace with the other rotten, immature teenagers. No blogger, whatever her stance on anything as a writer or as a person, deserves personal attack. Especially in her personal space.

New Blog Friend, I encourage you to take action. I encourage all of us to protect ourselves from Mean People.

Those of us who host our blogs on Wordpress.org can make a quick fix by means of a plugin called WP-Ban. It allows you to ban specific IP addresses from ever accessing your page again, and you can use it to block Mean People as well as spammers and bots. Just copy the IP address on the comments they leave, drop it into a certain text field, save, and you’re done. You can even choose what kind of message you want to show up on the screen when they try to access your domain.

I wish I knew how to do something similar on Wordpress.com and on Blogger. There ought to be something to protect people on every content management system. Mean People are the blogosphere equivalent of the junior high school bully – and should be treated as such. Shut them up.

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Bloggers, please share so we all know: Have the Mean People gotten to your blog? What platform do you use, and what did you do?

It’s time for another shameless plug for Wordpress!

to Wordpress without having to mess with your FTP. How awesome is that? From your dashboard, just go to the Plugins drop-down and click “Add New.” You’ll be taken to a search screen where you can click on popular subject tags or enter a search term and look around that way. I must have spent 30 minutes on there the other day, just kicking around the index and finding plugins I’d never even thought of before.

My current favorite is called WPhone. It’s a plugin just for you, the administrator, and it makes your Wordpress software work beautifully on any mobile device browser that doesn’t have full internet like the iPhone does. I used to try to work on posts from my Sidekick, but it was freaking impossible. Nothing fit right on the screen and a bunch of background scripts took way too long to load. This handy plugin gives you access to not only write and edit posts, but to manage everything from your posts and pages to links and plugins. Just search “WPhone” in that plugin search box and you can be up and running in two minutes.

Check out my new Guidespot Guide about the next round of plugins!

Over the holidays, I worked with my friend Jenn on moving her Wordpress.com blog over to self-hosting on Wordpress.org. I did a few graphic-y things for her (and I am VERY proud of that header!) and she’s all over the easy user interface that makes it simple for her to customize. We used the same basic Mandigo theme that I use here, and futzed with it a bit to make it a different setup, different bullet graphics, etc. It’s very pink.

CLICK!

Quick! Raise your hand if you got a Britney Spears song in your head as soon as you read the title of this post!

Hah.

I mean that I made another Guidespot thing… two, actually. I made it a series on getting set up with Wordpress and I am in bragging mode… mostly because those guides are pretty much the only thing I’ve accomplished that I’m proud of this week.

Start here:

And you can click through the links from that one (Part 1) to parts 2 and 3.

Maybe there’s one other thing I’m proud of this week – I wrote the first 17 pages of my novel, which is very exciting. Writing it, I mean, not the book itself. THAT remains to be seen. I don’t even know why I started it except that there is so much stuff in my head, so much going on in personal life that I don’t know how else to deal with it. Some of it I can’t even bring myself to write on here. Some of it is just straight up TOO LONG and you’d all fall asleep trying to scroll through it.

I feel kind of rotten and I have for about 3 weeks.

I think I’m either sick with another viral lung infection or I need to add an antidepressant to my mood-stabilizing meds. At this point I’d really prefer the lung infection because it would get me out of work. I’m really and truly not sure how much longer I can take this. I’ve cried at my desk for the last week and I don’t know what to do. It doesn’t help that everyone I need to get my job done is completely failing me, from delivering packages to finishing PowerPoints. Asshats.

Yesterday I stared at my computer here at work for hours and did nothing – brain off. Then I went home and wrote ten pages. Brain on. Two days ago it was the same – could not accomplish a thing at work, but could write two Guidespot things at home. I can fake productivity and even happiness to some extent, but it exhausts me to do that and I feel like I’m moving in a cloud. Even when my brain is on, my body is incredibly fatigued. I sleep and sleep. I nap for at least 2 hours every day when I get home from work. After I helped E move last weekend, I fell asleep on the floor. I get dizzy every time I yawn (and I’m yawning a lot), and even sometimes when I don’t. I feel weak when I take deep breaths.

How much of this is stress and depression, and how much of it is me actually being sick? Really, when Guidespot is the highlight of your WEEK, isn’t something wrong?

My post on my experience getting started with self-hosting and Wordpress.org was a big hit, and I’d been intending to follow up with another post about some of the things I’m learning as I proceed – tips and tricks for making my blog more efficient, interactive, and so on. I’ve been trying out a number of basic Wordpress.org plugins and thought I might write a similar review-slash-primer on those.

Instead of doing a loooooong post here, I’ve jumped on the Guidespot bandwagon and posted “Wordpress.org Plugins – Getting Started with the Basics” for your viewing pleasure. Watch out – it may be educational and therefore hazardous to your health.

I’m hoping you guys can help me out. Would you take a quick look at it on Guidespot and let me know what you think? Is it too technical? Do I give enough references? Enough or too much information on personal experience? Especially if you don’t self-host yet – is it SCARY? This is my first try at Guidespot and I want to be sure that the content I’m providing is really going to be useful for people who want to try things like this.

I am also probably going to turn that previous Wordpress post of mine into a Guidespot thingermajig at some time, since a lot of people wrote to me and said it was helpful, etc. I think I’ll go retroactively and call that Part I and this guide will be Part II.

Thoughts? I’d really appreciate your feedback. Pretty please leave a comment here or on the Guidespot page, or email me directly. Thanks muchly!

Hooray! Today is the day that the blog design is really done and I can stop messing with it for awhile. Most issues have been resolved and I’m finally very happy with the way this thingie both works and looks – even more so because I did it myself, and that’s a fun feeling. I spent a lot of money this summer on things I couldn’t afford, meaning a professional blog design got cut off the list. I was kind of jealous of the people who had such pretty pages on their own domain names and blog lust kicked in.

But self, I said, can’t YOU just do it? Come on, you had your first webpage on GeoCities and you were messing with basic html when you were 14. You at least knew how to work with if not write javascripts a year later. You can speak binary. Heck, you’re one of the 17 people in the world who remembers what a BBS is because you actually used one. And you have impeccable design skills, really. You can read a book about how to do this and the Intertubes will tremble.

And really? It’s not that hard! I got this guy…

and dedicated a lonely Saturday night to a date with my shiny new laptop. I signed up for a domain name and basic hosting with Tigertech.net and thank you baby Jesus, they pretty much dummy-proofed the startup process for me. Everything in the Dummies book correlated nicely with the way Tigertech has their user page set up. I knew exactly where to go to do my PHP thing and my MySQL thing and all the other thingy-things. Don’t ask me what those are, I just did them AND I DIDN’T HAVE TO KNOW WHAT THEY ARE TO DO IT.

The Dummies book recommended several FTP programs (file transfer protocol, I knew that one! It moves files from your hard drive to your host server). I chose one called FileZilla. Since the book and my server were so helpful, it was really easy to get my FTP set up.

I installed the Wordpress.org design and editing software because it runs like good old Wordpress.com and has so many built-in options for customization. They advertise a 5-minute install for the software and the kids are not lying. Simple. If you’ve used Wordpress.com, you’ll love how similar it is to what you’re used to. And if you’ve used Blogger (and I have, so I can say this), you will worship its superiority.

But then came the scariest step. I had to move the blog. All the content, all my writing, the good, bad and ugly of three years just HAD to make it with me in the transfer. I was scared. I ate a peanut butter cup to calm down. The Dummies book spelled it all out for me though, how to export from Wordpress.com and import to Wordpress.org. The book also includes instructions on how to move blogs from Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, and I think a few others. It worked! My posts, my categories, my pictures, my blogroll, everything imported. Not all platforms will import EVERYTHING, categories and whatnot, but the book explains it further,

CAVEAT: Four posts randomly went missing, and I only noticed because my post count at the old host was 4 more than my post count after the import. Check this before you delete anything from your old blog! Since my old blog still existed, I just copied and pasted the text and entered the correct publishing date and those posts are online with the new blog now. A small pain, but easy enough to fix.

Now the fun part! Aesthetics!

Wordpress.org starts off your blog, even if you’ve imported it, with its own very basic theme, and you get to take it from there. There are gajillions of free themes on themes.wordpress.net, and most of them come with nice instructions about how to upload them via FTP. The Dummies book has info on this too.

I wanted SGB to look unique but I didn’t want to dive into a lot of code to do it. The Dummies book has information about CSS and whatnot, but I was still sweating peanut butter from the blog transfer so I looked for a free theme with opportunity to customize. There were so many! This theme you see here is called Mandigo, and it is by far my favorite of all the themes I looked at and/or tried before settling. You can customize easily with a theme options tool that is built right in – colors, header, columns (how many, where placed), widgets, plugins, all sorts of little stuff that you’d have to change in the code of many other themes. No need for code here – just fill in the blanks! Plus, there’s a user wiki for support and I found a few other tricks on there, like how to make my image header clickable and so on.

(And that comment glitch should be fixed, effective now. Something to do with IE and graphic file types. I dunno. But it’s awesome that I don’t HAVE to understand to fix it! The designer himself wrote to me and helped me out. There’s a lot of support even when you’re self-hosting and you feel like you’re on your own out there.)

I thought about just buying a custom header and building a color scheme around that, but I was dorking around on iStockphoto and found the little redhead up there. It’s soooo uncanny – I have chin-length red hair, green eyes, Converse shoes, and I wear white-rimmed sunglasses. All year. I have three pairs. So I bought the image rights (check out the designer’s portfolio, he has a lot of other graphics if you like that look) and set off to Adobe InDesign to see what I could come up with. Mandigo lets you put in as many headers as you want and will rotate them for you, which is why you often see different subtitles up there. I made the background image in InDesign as well – if you look, you might notice that all the writing is just portions of some of my posts.

There are so many free backgrounds out there as well, and you can have fun making a header if you’re so inclined, or there are some pretty cheap but nice ones available for customization and purchase. Jenn’s Must Love Geek just got a makeover from So Chic Design and they do reasonably priced headers and full custom or premade designs, along with many other design studios. I just got all DIY on it and had some fun, and it turned out pretty well. Even without custom images, Mandigo still offers options for several headers and backgrounds, all built in. I bet if you browse through themes.wordpress.net, you’ll see something that tickles your fancy and you’ll be inspired to try it.

I heart my new blog design. For those of you out there who are thinking about making the jump to self-hosting but are afraid of cost and effort, don’t be! I get my blog hosted for $72/year and I bought one image for $35 and one very important book for $25. That’s IT. That’s what this blog cost. It took one Saturday night and many small tweaks since then, but it’s all mine and if you’re a blogger, you understand how great it feels to produce something that’s all yours and show it off to the Interwebs. It’s the blog equivalent of sweat equity, and sometimes it makes me so happy I just sit and look at it for a bit and think “yay me!”

I do still pride myself on the content of my blog, and it’s a hundred times more important than a color scheme or a widget. If you didn’t love the heart and soul of SGB, you wouldn’t be here and my pretty page would have an audience of one. But I want my kids to go to good schools AND have nice clothes. Now my baby has a brain and a pretty outfit with purple sneakers.

Done! Woo!

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