I am using WordPress software for spyke.com. WordPress generates blog style web sites. The blog style works well for spyke.com now. It is easy to get started, and easy to grow. When there is more content, I can look into other ways to organize it.

Check out some of the features. Be sure to sign up for the RSS feed and get updates delivered directly to your browser.

Also try out the comment section. Go ahead, just say hello. You can create an account to use for posting. Use an alias if you want. I have set up the site to accept anonymous comments, so if you prefer, you can comment without signing in. Comments are not moderated. So no privacy concerns, and no censoring. I may have to change that when the spambots find the site.

Also, if you want to say a lot, and you do not want to be limited to comments, let me know. I can set up your account so you can create the main blog entries.

One important advantage with using WordPress is how easy it is to add a page; all I have to do is start typing. Presto, a new head page, and all the old pages get moved to the archive and indexed by date. Back in the day I used to hand edit  html. Besides the content, I had to add html formatting, and re-arrange the internal links. It was much more effort than just saying what I wanted to say. That extra effort was enough of a psychological barrier that I would just not bother. (Perhaps that filter was a good thing?)

Another advantage of WordPress, or for that matter, any canned web site content management system over roll your own html is compatibility. The WordPress generated pages contain special code for each browser brand and revision. It used to be a constant struggle to make the web pages look good on all browsers with homespun html. It is nice that someone else has figured those compatibility problems. Other advantages include the aforementioned RSS feed, user registration, and comments. Those features are standard, out of the box, with WordPress. They are things I would never attempt on my own.

Of course, not everything is perfect. On the old spyke.com I used an art gallery motif. I will probably move to a gallery design in the future. For getting started again, the blog approach is perfect. It is a low entry barrier, and I can enhance it later when necessary and motivated. WordPress has several themes, or skins. There are themes that come packaged with the distribution, and others themes available from third parties. I wasted most of the day yesterday trying to create a custom theme for spyke.com. Everything I touched made things worse. I am going to have to read the manual before trying that again. For the time being, I am limited to the themes that others have provided. I will probably be changing skins frequently. So, please help me, when things change, please comment on what your like and dislike about the different layout / colors / fonts.