Web Development

Your Home Office

Start building your website as soon as possible. Start learning how to use the cPanel at the hosting company you choose. I recommend Bluehost. I’ve used them for years and so far, they have been flawless.

Read the documentation. Seek the truth about Bluehost, the cPanel and WordPress. Practice using them. Get your website up and running as soon as possible and start telling stories about whatever you like to tell stories about.

Create lots of content. Kate is your primary writing tool. It’s simple and easy to use. It is also a powerful text editor that you can use to edit computer code, in addition to editing stories.

I cannot recommend Calligra Words. All the other Calligra tools work fine. Calligra Words has some glaring defects. If you want to use an old fashioned word processor, then I recommend OpenOffice.

Use OpenOffice Impress or Calligra Stage to produce great backgrounds for your videos and things like that. I like using Kdenlive for embedding videos into OpenOffice Impress slides.

Learn how to use a spreadsheet. Use OpenOffice Calc to organize your financial documentation. Write a sheet listing all of your bills. What company, how much you owe, when is the bill due and all kinds of information like that. Keep it up to date. Make a separate list for your professional bills and your personal bills. Create another sheet listing your income, with the source, the amount and the schedule.

Link all of your sheets together, so that making changes in one statement automatically updates all the statements. So, when you make an entry into your ledger, it automatically updates your profit and expense sheets, etc.

Make lists of prospects and customers. Make a list of your products and services. Get really good at using your OpenOffice tools. Later on, you’ll learn how to build databases using Kexi and PostgreSQL. For now, learn how to use OpenOffice for producing professional documentation for your free enterprise.

And get your local development environment set up, so you can work on improving Calligra and OpenOffice. Practice being creative with your computer science skills by using them to improve Calligra. Make Calligra a high performance set of office productivity tools. And work on synchronizing it with Kontact and the rest of your KDE Plasma information management system.

Creating Content

Start by writing a lot of valuable stories. Entertain us. Teach us something that will improve our lives. Then, learn how to create podcasts and videos and make yourself a prolific story teller.

Make sure your stories are really valuable. Study the subjects you are writing about thoroughly. Organize your stories in a logical sequence.

Be productive. Practice creativity. Edit and polish the stories as you cultivate your whole website. Cultivate your website just like you would tend a garden. Every story is a valuable piece of property.

Keep improving each story and keep working on developing an easy to follow pattern and arrangement of stories. Design an advanced curriculum of entertaining education. Add in photos and videos and advertisements.

Be mindful of the organization of each of your stories and also how the stories are arranged and flow together. Make sure they flow logically and semantically.

Use the powerful free and open source artistry tools. Krita, Gimp, Inkscape and Blender are some of the tools you can experiment with, to create art for your website. There are many more.

Bluehost

Bluehost is the hosting company I’m using. I’ve used Bluehost for quite a few projects now. I like them. They always answer my questions fairly quickly. I usually use the chat form, whenever I have a problem. They’ve always solved the problem.

You can learn and use the cPanel fairly easily. cPanel is the control panel for your websites. The hard part about learning how to use it is that you set up your website and then you rarely look at your cPanel. You forget everything by the time you create a new website.

You can install WordPress on your computer and work on the website at localhost, on your computer and not the Internet, and then use Secure SHell, SSH, to git-push your changes up to the remote server at Bluehost, which serves your website to the Internet. SSH allows you to securely login to your host company’s computers and upload all the changes you have made to your website on localhost.

Sometimes, companies talk you into setting up auto-pay. Beware of that. Use OpenOffice Calc to keep track of your bills.

Since I’m using cPanel, I haven’t had to use SSH or do anything about the database or webserver. Git is fairly easy to set up, SSH is a little more complicated. You have to get your public and private keys set up in the right place and then you’re good to go.

Spend some time in your cPanel. Read all the official Documentation. There is not really all that much of it. Probably the hardest thing about setting up your website is getting your domain name registered and properly pointing towards your website.

Follow the instructions to get your DNS Records properly set. There is always two of them. I got my homeoffice.studio domain name from Hover.com. Sometimes you can transfer a domain you get somewhere else to Bluehost, but I could not do that with .studio. Getting your domain name from Bluehost is a good idea.

You can also set up a Cloud Flare account with Bluehost. Cloud Flare is a global network that will help you efficiently distribute your website around the world.

Make sure you get a security certificate. Bluehost automatically secures the website with HTTPS, but you have to get the security certificate yourself. The certificate signals browsers that your website is secure.

Investigate PHP and WordPress. Focus on Bluehost and WordPress. Each one of these is a powerful, valuable resource. cPanel is your dashboard. Learn how to use it well.

Homeoffice is a very popular domain name. I’m surprised that .studio is so exotic that I had to get it from Hover and could not transfer it to Bluehost. It probably has something to do with studio has more than three letters in it. homeoffice.studio is a great domain name.

If you can, I recommend getting your domain name from Bluehost. In either case, you point your domain name to the IP address of your website, which Bluehost provides. I don’t have anything against Hover, its just that I would rather have everything in one place.

Bluehost will guide you through the process. There’s some pretty good documentation on your Bluehost Webhosting Help directory. Read all of it. Study. Practice. Get really good at creating accounts and adjusting them as needed.

WordPress

Once you get your website set up, your WordPress dashboard is where you will be doing a lot of work. Log in to your website in one tab on your browser and log into your WordPress Dashboard in another tab.

At first, you will spend a lot of time and effort in your Appearance section, selecting a theme and adjusting your menus and widgets.

Posts and Pages are your main sections. That is where you will be creating content. Write your articles in your text editor and copy and pasting them into your WordPress editor.

Use Kate to create and edit the stories and then copy and paste them into the WordPress’ Gutenberg block editor.

Edit the stories in your WordPress Editor. Add photos and videos. Get a reasonable amount of articles written and posted, then concentrate on editing and polishing the articles and producing lots of blog posts to keep adding fresh content. You don’t want too many articles. Make the, “course,” you are teaching thorough and concise.

Plugins

Start developing websites with a WordPress website hosted on Bluehost. Investigate Jetpack and Yoast. There are many such plugins to extend WordPress.

Do your own research. Get really good at using your WordPress tools. Imagine being a really great piano player, except you create website content, rather than music. Practice! A lot!

Of course, you could be producing music for your website. Music could be your content. It could be part of your content. Linux has some really awesome tools for producing music. Be an artist.

Beyond WordPress

You could build on your PHP skills and develop a Joomla or Drupal website. I recommend learning Python and start using it to develop high performance websites, because that’s what I want to study and learn and develop.

The main reason I like Python over PHP is that Python seems more popular with business, while PHP seems to be more popular with government agencies and non-profit organizations.

PHP is the most common web application language. Python is much more versatile. You can build websites and a lot of other applications using Python.

Python is often cited as a great way to develop artificial intelligence, which seems like a very interesting subject to me. So learn both. PHP and WordPress for getting up and running as fast as possible. Then, start using Python to develop Django and Flask web applications.

Lua is another computer programming language that seems very useful for programming your Linux configuration and your Latex documents. See if you can use it in your website development projects. Zsh and Lua are the primary scripting languages I recommend. Learn them both to make yourself a high performance computer programmer and website developer.

Learn how to use Apache2 and Nginx and PostgreSQL, with Django-CMS or Flask. Use Zurb-Foundation and Vue at the front end of your website. Learn how to use these tools efficiently. Learn how to spin up a new website any time you want to start a new project. Then, you really will be a full stack web developer.

Have fun using these tools. Be an artist. Be productive. Unleash your creativity. Create something beautiful, functional and valuable. Add value to our global cloud of artificial intelligence.

Photo by Bob Mccoy using Inkscape
Photo by Bob Mccoy using Samsung Note 9