CMS are like blogger.com on steroids

I've been a little ill lately, so I've taken the time to get to grips with the CMS (content management systems) that my hosting provides.

I thought it would come easy, seeing I know the ins and outs of blogger.com, though to put it this way, blogger.com is the bare bones and the content management systems I've been exploring are the fleshy bits wearing a hat and carrying a bag full of rocks.

I thought I'd be able to have a website up and running in a couple weeks, but it looks like I'm going to have to take my time with it.

So far I've tried out 3 content management systems, Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla. They all come packaged with my hosting account at Hostgator, I just had to install them.

Wordpress was to similar to Blogger for me so I thought I'd try out the scarier looking options.

Drupal was great, heaps of plugins (they call em modules) to add more functions to your site, though customizing the look of a template looked pretty tricky.

Drupal's very community driven and it seems very dependent on everyone who contribute keeping everything up to date with each new version of Drupal that comes along.

The one thing I really hated about Drupal was I spent a lot time tinkering around in the file manager on my hostgator account, at this point that's a very scary place to me.

Joomla is much the same as drupal, community driven, though there's a huge commercial side to it, half the templates out there cost money.

What I like most about Joomla over Drupal is it seems I can do everything I want from the Joomla dashboard thingy, upload pictures, edit the CCS and what not without having to go into my hostgator file manager thing, very comfortable and reminds me a little of blogger.com.

Well that's as far as I've come with creating my website and as I've realized it's going to take awhile to achieve what I want, it'll be back to blogging here a lot more.

Don't worry loads more paranormalness on the way.

Just an update on Hosting and Domain Names

So my domain name went live, it's not My Paranormal Life, I went with something different and I may buy another name, not sure yet.

So here's the deal, with Hostgator they give you a bunch of CMS (content management systems) pretty much just more advanced versions of blogger, I've chosen to play around with Wordpress first, it seems similar to blogger.

The problem I've just realized is that Hostgator have so many options like this that I'm going to be learning a lot of it for quite awhile, so the new site wont be live for a long long time.

Though what I've been noticing is that you can have loads of these CMS packages added right to the same domain, for example the Wordpress blog would be like this www.dominname.com and if I add a forum package I'll make a new directory like this www.dominname.com/forum. Having a proper website should keep everything consistent.

It's certainly doing my head in, but so did blogger when I first started using it, I just hope I complete my learning curve pretty soon.

Just got me a domain and some hosting

I've been thinking about making a proper website for awhile now, but I'm not a huge spender, the thought of buying something I really know nothing about put me off a little, but I thought what the heck, I learn best when I'm thrown in the deep end.

Buying some hosting and a domain name.

This is what I just did, well a day ago. I went looking for hosting packages and it was tough, there are so many out there it's almost painful, it certainly did my head in. In the end I picked one from the tabs I had open which was Hostgator, seemed to have a good rep with all that I had read in searching, so I went with it.

I purchased the baby plan, shared server I think, which cost me about a 120 bucks for a years hosting plus 15 bucks for a domain name for a year.

I could have bought the domain name cheaper somewhere else and pointed it to the server (or something like that).

Now all I have to do is wait for my domain name to be propagated (activated I guess) across the web and I'll be ready to do a whole lot more reading. You have to wait a couple days before you can even start working on or even seeing your new website, well you could work on the site, but it's a little hard not seeing what your doing.

Right now, the idea of the whole thing I have and judging by the options available to me in my hosting control panel it shouldn't be to different from using blogger, though it looks like it'll be a whole lot easier to control and manage. They have many packages that you can install, including Wordpress, which hopefully I'll use to learn it all, not to different from blogger.

I'll keep y'all updated on the experience, I know I have a lot of blogging friends that may find this info useful.