Carmella's Hang Out

Welcome to the newest addition to your collection of blogs. Back in early to mid April, I got the idea to design a website for you, after recalling a comment Mom made about how much you really did want a website of your own. It was that, combined with the realization I had absolutely no other gift ideas, that drove me to start working on this site.

It wasn’t easy, either. I couldn’t make it when you or any other family members were around. I tried to work on it when others were in the room, but it was too nerve-wracking and slow to really be worth the time. That meant I usually could only work on it when you were at work or when you went to bed late at night, both of which didn’t occur often enough for me to work on the project steadily.

I had a few bumps along the way to completion of the project, one which made me wonder if I would have to scrap the entire thing before I really got started. Fortunately, with prayer, and blind action, I was able to get the site up and ready, long before your birthday arrived. I was pretty certain I would be able to do so, but I was a little nervous that more trials were ahead that would cause me more problems, cutting into the remaining time I had.

But all that fear is over now: the site is up and ready for your tweaking. I’ve laid the basic groundwork for what you’ll need, but I’m certain you’ll find it too dry and boring for your own taste. Which is fine; I’m certain some of the things I wrote down would be too dry and boring for my taste as well. I figured you’d change what I wrote down anyway, so I didn’t bother opening the thesaurus to get just the right word for each page. Some of the things written down are copied directly from your site, but tweaked a little for this layout.

If you haven’t noticed already, you have your own domain name. This was one of my other hurdles in designing the site – what was I to call the thing? I had worked hard on making a logo, but carmella.com and carmellas.com were both taken for several years (and would cost thousands of dollars to purchase from the owners). I took the safe route – which still took me several days to finally decide to use – and went with carmshangout.com. It wasn’t easy, and I wasn’t even sure once I placed the order that I made the right decision, but it’s too late to turn back now.

Now that I’ve told you the story of this site’s construction, let me give you a tour of the features in the site. This site is coded with Wordpress, an open source blog utility much like any other blogging system you’ve used before. You should be able to use the program without much difficulty. You won’t need to deal with HTML very much, as the interface places the code in the page for you.

The logo/header area has a small graphic of the eight family members, each of which can be clicked to lead to the respective family biography page. I took the liberty of updating the graphics for the bio pages to something a little more professional. These can be easily changed if they disappoint, but personally I think they’re an improvement. I’ve given you your own “About” page outside of the family area, so there is less confusion no who “Carmella” is for the new visitors.

Once you’ve visited the family bio pages, I’m sure you’ll notice the lack of pictures at the bottom of the description, as they were once located in your original site. I moved them to your new Images area, and sorted them by each family member. I’ve included your own images area at the top of the list, as well as a General images area for the three images you had on your original Images page. Each family members page is linked with an anchor, which is an inline bookmark which can be linked with an address such as this: http://www.carmshangout.com/myimages/#dad. This link would take you to the “My Father” area of your Images page. Each family member’s biography page has a link to their respective image list in the Images page. This removes the clutter from the family pages (I know, you like that, but bear with me), and removes any redundancy with duplicate image entries in the biography pages and Image page.

Your Files page hosts the files once located in your “Carm’s Files from Outer Space” area. I’ve moved them over here to avoid any confusion with site layouts, and also to give you the freedom to upload files in the future and link them in your site. The Outer Space site wasn’t often used, and was rather hidden, so I think moving everything to one site will improve the hit count.

The Archives page is just that: the archives of all the posts written on the site. It will update with each new month and/or category made or filled; you won’t need to do anything to update it.

The Links page is for all the links that you like to visit, but don’t want to include on the sidebar (I’ll get to that later). I originally didn’t have a links page planned, but realized the sidebar gets rather cluttered very quickly, and a separate page would be necessary to reduce further mess. You can organize this the way you choose. I copied the links from your links page you had already made (I looked over your shoulder for the address, haha!), but you can remove whatever you want.

Finally, the Forum link takes you to your new forum on the DH|Personal forum list. I’ve designed a new layout for your area, and duplicated many of the forums (including their names) into the site. One day I’d like to buy an Ultimate Bulletin Board license to get a better looking forum, but what I have now will have to do. It’s not the greatest, but it’s much better than EZBoard, that’s certain.

The main content area is where, obviously, all your content will go. The large text is the page Title, which you will see has its own place in the post writing interface, the small text underneath is the date in which it was made, and the rest is the text you’ll enter in the Post area. Each Title links to the individual entry, upon which can be TrackBacked and Commented. Users have the ability to comment on each of your posts both anonymously or with a registered name. You can set the requirement for comments to your liking. In the Write area of your interface you also have the option to make permanent pages which are outside of the normal blogging archive system, which is how I made the Images, biography, and links pages, among others.

The sidebar is the area to the right of the content, which contains the mass of links and other comments you placed on your original Hang Out site. Included in the sidebar is a search bar, which searches your archives for the text queried. Under that, in alphabetical order, is the following: contact page (also included in your About page), your Current Image (you used a .bmp!), Current Mood, Current Playlist (I’ve updated it to be an actual list, not an image), Current Song, Current Website, Guestbook, and This Day in History (you can find a better version at http://www.historychannel.com/tdih). Most of the link descriptions are easy to understand, so I won’t go through and describe each. You can customize each header, description, link, and link description in the Links area of your blog interface. You’ll probably be able to get rid of a few of the links I posted anyway (the list is rather long at the moment, especially noticeable in the Files page).

Finally, the bottom area of the page is your footer, which includes the copyright, the WordPress URL, and your RSS feeds. RSS feeds are links that are “live”, in that the data to which they link is updated each time you make a post. These feeds, read via an RSS reader, are sent to the users monitoring the links like emails, or newsgroups. Each “email” links to a post you’ve written on the site, immediately alerting the user monitoring the link to a new post on your site. The user can then read the description in their RSS reader, or link to your site and read it here. I have many feeds I visit daily via Mozilla Thunderbird, and they’re a very helpful utility.

There is much more to the site, which I can teach you how to use when you’re ready. WordPress is a great system, and I’m sure you’ll be pleased with it. Happy Birthday, Carmella. Enjoy your site.