My recollection of setting up a WordPress blog from my LIBR-240 class (back at least a year and a half ago now), was that it was difficult, tedious, and not exactly intuitive.  This is especially true if you really want to make it your own, to adapt and manipulate the themes, plugins, and widgets to your desires.  However, setting up my blog this go-round proved easier than expected.  While I would still caution those taking the plunge for the first time to proceed slowly, focusing on each detail, advances in plugins and themes have helped make personalization less necessary and a beautiful blog simple to achieve.  The hard part is how to choose a theme.  I settled on the simple “Typograph” theme.  It was nicely laid out, had all of the features I needed for the blog, and incorporated an “arts and design” feel that I wanted for a blog that represents my interests.

When it came time to choose plugins, I also suffered from extreme indecision.  In the end, I decided to add 3 plugins–Global Translator (a plugin that allows readers to change the text of the blog into a language of their choice), Sociable (allows sharing of blog content through social networking sites), and a podcast plugin (we will hopefully see more how this works when we delve in to podcasts later in the semester).  I did have some trouble with both Global Translator and Sociable.  Both of these plugins required a little more setup and it took me awhile to find the right settings.  When changing the settings for Sociable, I did not check the box that allowed the Sociable links to appear on the main page.  Going back to the settings for this plugin and enabling this function fixed this particular problem.  Global Translator was a little more difficult.  After adding the plug-in, I did not realize that I needed to add it as a widget as well to allow the translation flags to show on the main page.  In the settings for Global Translator, it also gives you the choice of how you would like your flags to display.  Apparently the “image map” function does not display properly, but choosing the “show in a div” option allowed my flags to be visible to readers and for readers to change the blog language to one that works for them.

Overall, I would say that the blog experience thus far has been an enjoyable one.  I still have a bit of tweaking to do here and there (setting up my rss, changing the “about” section).  Hopefully these changes will even be done by the time most readers explore this site.