WordPress

Build your own local development environment. Use Linux, LXC and LXD, Apache2 and Nginx, Kexi and PostgreSQL, WordPress and Kadence to build a platform for building websites and other applications.

Getting Started

WordPress is relatively easy to get started learning and using. There already is a lot of documentation, both official and not so official. WordPress is the most popular website framework.

There are many web hosting businesses that supply WordPress hosting. Bluehost has apparently decided to specialize in WordPress. And so far, Bluehost and WordPress have done everything I wanted them to do and more.

WordPress is actually a very good entry point for your adventure of learning computer science and developing applications. Get your WordPress website set up and running and start creating content. Keep exploring the computer science and learning more and building your free enterprise on your programmable, local development environment, in your holistic home office.

Study. Get familiar with your hosting company c-panel and your WordPress Dashboard. Read the documentation. Investigate continuously and learn more all the time. Keep working. Keep studying and learning and teaching people how to live long and prosper.

Sections

Click on the + sign between the blocks or at the top left of your Gutenberg editor and get familiar with those options. Scroll down in the list. There are a lot of options.

I tend to write a long story. Then, I break it up into sections. I rearrange the content a lot, gathering related content under the appropriate section heading. Edit and polish your stories.

Sections help you organize your content into logical order. They also help eliminate a lot of the repetition in your stories. Work your way through the entire website every once in a while, editing and polishing the stories. Start in the middle sometimes, so you have a fresh perspective on the second half of your stories. They get a lot better every time.

I’m not sure this is the best way to write for the web, but its how I’ve been doing it ever since I started. You may develop a better workflow. I’ve read that some people never edit or polish their stories once they’ve been posted. They do all that before they post the story.

The most important activity is to write. Produce a lot of valuable content. Each story is a valuable peace of property. Add your photos and videos. Make an interesting, attractive portal into our global cloud of artificial intelligence.

Building Your WordPress Shop

After using WordPress for several weeks, I am fairly impressed. Its very easy to use. I do a lot of editing and polishing stories in the WordPress editor. Everything is on the Bluehost servers. I just log in and paste the story into the editor, then I edit and polish them until they are great stories.

Work on getting all the pieces of your local development environment set up and working well together, so that you can completely control every detail of your websites. Use free and opensource software, not because it is free, but because it enables you to execute your own free enterprise.

Work on keeping the stories on your website synchronized with the stories on your local file system. Use LXC and D, Git and SSH to isolate your applications from your local operating system and seamlessly connect your local development environment and your remote servers, which backup and serve your live websites. In other words, you have copies of your website in your local development environment and perhaps in a separate remote development repository, where you can collaborate with a team of developers.

In order to use your local development environment in your website development workflow, you may have to have your websites hosted in a Virtual Private Server (VPS), in order to gain SSH access to the server. And you will have to maintain and repair it yourself. Shared Hosting has its advantages and VPS hosting also has its advantages. Keep working on improving your skills, and make your choice based on your skill level.

You do not need to be a PHP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript programmer to build WordPress websites. WordPress and your theme do most of the programming. I use Kadence Pro theme and the WordPress’s Gutenberg Block Editor to do most of my website development work.

Once you get your local development environment set up and learn how to use it, you’ll be able to spin up an instance of WordPress, Flask or Django, whenever you want to start a new project. You’ll have to get both, a PHP development environment and a Python environment, if you want to develop both PHP projects like WordPress and Drupal, and Python projects like Django and Flask. You can also work on developing native applications, like working on improving Kontact and Calligra, in your local development environment.

Be A Prolific Writer

Remember to get in the habit of writing your stories in your text editor and copy and paste them into the WordPress editor. Writing this way, will help you keep the stories on your computer synchronized with the stories on the website.

There’s a difference between your articles and your blog posts. Articles are static content, like white papers, that are the content of your entertaining education. Your blog posts are more like news of current events, which fade into the back ground as you produce more blog posts.

Blog posts are what is going on right now. Articles are more persistent content for your audience. Once you get familiar with using WordPress to publish your stories, start adding pictures to them.

Read the stories on your website. That way you can see the stories in the context they are presented in. Edit and polish them repeatedly. They get better every time you edit them.

Produce at least 30 really valuable stories before you even think about trying to monetize your content. Continue to add valuable content after that and start working on increasing the traffic to your website. And whatever you do, do not clutter up your content with obnoxious advertisements popping up in the middle of your stories.

Monetize Your Website

Search engine optimization is an important facet of your website development. Once you cultivate a good relationship with your growing audience, then you can start working on monetizing your websites.

Perhaps you’ll write books and publish them using BookBaby, Lulu or IngramSpark or some other print on demand publishing service. You can sell the book on your website and on Barnes and Noble or Amazon.com, etc.

Affiliate programs are another good way to earn income from your website. Pick affiliate programs that match the content of your website and focus on a few really good ones, rather than a bunch of unrelated advertisements that interrupt your audience.

CJ Affiliates or Clickbank are one way that you can monetize your websites. You can recommend other people’s products on your website. You can also offer your products on CJ Affiliates or Clickbank.

Write every day. At least 5 days a week. Self-discipline is required. You are responsible and accountable for your own creativity. Taking personal responsibility for your productivity is the key to self-determination, which is the key to your own personal free enterprise. Keep working. Keep writing. Telling stories. Maximize your productivity. Minimize your distractions. Focus on creating content for your audience.