WordPress.com

1. jeanniespace
   Member
   Mar 10, 2012, 1:51 AM

   This is a question about whether I should upgrade to pro, whatever it is, or move to wordpress.org. For an intelligent answer, I need to tell you what my background is: It's a long background, but that's because I'm old.

   I'm an outdated programmer and coll. prof. who ran a cross-country teaching website, using html to do most of what we needed. That means I have to learn proficiency now with CSS and Javascript and maybe JQuery and certainly HTML5, and maybe xtm. I taught research and spss at CSUDH for thirty-five years. Just before that I was programming in Fortran at USC, and about to go into C. Considered a job working for the census bureau on their computers. Teaching meant I had to focus on other stuff, like leaving behind punch cards when we went digital while I was at UCLAW, from which I graduated and took the Calif. Bar in 1985.

   My students at csudh asked to do an undergraduate moot court for their B.A, to prepare for either law school or paralegal. The Stanley Mosk Undergraduate Moot Court continued until I retired. That program, which involved actual participation by Cal. Supreme Court justices and Apellate and Superior Court Judges, led to the cross-country teaching website, that i am now working on updating and restructuring to be freely accessible under a Creative Commons license.

   In connection with this project, I am considering moving my earthlink website to WordPress - but which Word Press, WordPress.com or WordPress.org will best fit my commitment to open source, free access, and the pairing of mobile as well as traditional offerings?

   If someone, anyone with the patience, please, would tell me where I can find the information I need - such as, whether the same options are available in Ubuntu as using Windows 7 (I have a new dual boot computer, where I'm using Ubuntu for the first time.)

   A couple of more complicating details: I'll want to include my own art , using a Wacom Wireless Intuos tablet. Any problems with that and WordPress?

   Can someone tell me the best book on WordPress to bring me up to speed, so I can either pick it up on O'Reilly or read it on safaribooksonline.com? I'll be glad to read the others, but I've got a deadline set for May, when I'd like to have all of this up, including the novel I wrote with NaNoWriMo in November, that goes with it all..

   Oh, yes, the novel. I'm considering an Indie publisher because of the time pressure, but would also be willing to self-publish (using WordPress?) if that would fit in with the rest of the package Susan and I are planning. (Susan' s my colleague at U of Wisc.). I'll get to the other WordPress books and videos and whatever certainly, but it would help if I could prioritize to meet the May deadline. And some of the artwork still needs to be done after the wacom tablet gets here. (My old tablet died somewhere around 2004.)

   At least I don't have a day job anymore. I'm Emeritus Prof. now, but Susan's still teaching. So I get to do most of the digital adaptation with a partner a couple of thousand miles away, and in this yucky financial environment.

   I think I'll add a blog on "Come grow old with me, for a little intense excitement." jeannie curran

   The blog I need help with is jeanniespace.wordpress.com.

2. jwane
   Member
   Mar 10, 2012, 3:05 AM

   Hello Jeannie

   If your earthlink site uses flash or javascript then WordPress.org is what you're looking for, otherwise WordPress.com should work fine for you.

   WordPress is not operating system specific so Ubuntu will work just fine. I've been running Linux since 2005 and all computers at ARNews have Linux installed.

   Here's a site listing several WordPress books.

   Look at some of the WordPress sites here on a desktop/laptop then compare with your Wacom Intuos to see how it looks.

3. raincoaster
   Member
   Mar 10, 2012, 5:07 AM

   You have given us so much information we can'[t really determine what your questions are.

   What do you need the website to DO? Answer that question and we can tell you what to use.

4. jeanniespace
   Member
   Mar 11, 2012, 12:32 AM

   If I could have done that, the research project would be up and running.I took jwane's answer, downloaded a couple of books on list he provided: ProWordpress and another I had already started. and started to read.

   The first website started 35 years ago before there were websites. The website has grown to the point of doing some really special things. Here's a piece of what I wrote to my co-author this morning.

5. jeanniespace
   Member
   Mar 11, 2012, 1:28 AM

   Oops. Here's what I wrote:

   McDonnell and his rat - in terms of basic goals and missions

   freebies means that instructions are the things we're selling. But because they're education and the tickets to education, we give them away, because education is love and when people start selling love, things go chaotic. Like, was McDonnell always like the rat I keep seeing, or was he once just a nice ordinary man who would have considered lynching "wrong"? (Got to paint that rat I see. He's not ugly. The eyes are windows into the original loving guy, the guy who could be again, without the distortion of "knowing that he's right, and the Other wrong'.) What I'm trying to do here is find the original loving guy way deep down under the rat who announces "My main goal is to see that Obama is a one-term president." What can I paint, draw, construct, write, put in story form that would reach out and touch the "him" before that happened to him? (Wouldn't Rev. Al Sharpton love to share that? Hell, wouldn't Sartre?)

   Problem is that we're all like McDonnell. Sartre's concept of existence precedes essence. But Sartre understood that none of these states of existence (like such intense determination to unseat a given, real human being,) is the essence that defines us as who we are. In the law, we'd refer to that as substituting his own judgment for the judgment of the whole electorate. Damn, that's impressive arrogance. God-like. And he's probably Christian. I need to stick with Sartre.The essence comes only as we die, and then all those states of existence add up to the sum of the being we were in this world we have lived in. No one adds it up; it just IS at that point, the historical closing of the Who We Were. It's the neatest way of conceptualizing the indeterminancy of reality I ever read. And I read it in the 50s. Half a century ago. Just a tad more detailed than Gide's "Je deteste ceux qui m'entendre trop vite." Much of my thinking has always crystallized around Gide's comment in his journal in the 30s, and Sartre's existence precedes essence. I think those two sum up for me the arrogance of "knowingness," as John Lear puts it.
   (Reference to a good Sartre source on a range of levels- or write it, if we have to.
   and Jonathan Lear on knowingness. Several versions, already written in our website files. These theoretical pieces are freebies, too. I hope to split the texts up that way to offer snippets, with free access to the texts themselves for those who wish to pursue the ideas.)

   * * *

   Give me till my May deadline and Susan and I will be able to say a lot more concisely what it is we do. (Like Andre Gide, I'm tired of people trying to understand me too quickly, and at the same time, anxious to find a way to make people understand.

   One website will be devoted to information, like existence preceding essence. Susan and I have already written about five texts --- so much of that writing is done. 35 years ago, Susan was one of my students, who went on to Berkeley for her Ph.D., but she's a generation younger than me, so I still write to bring her up to date on stuff like Sartre that wouldn't have fit into criminal justice and sociology at Berkeley. Or like the original Summerhill (60's?) or Lee Rainwater's And the Poor Get Children (about the same time).

   Our books are on the Internet, accessible thru our site. But we're making up versions appropriate for those who want less extensive reading and for different groups, like elders, the very young, middle school, mature adolescents, etc. Novels embody much of the theory we covered in the books. Also to be on Web.

   Another website to bring together small groups who, in the process of using the information on governance and public-space discourse we cover in the books, use whatever skills available in the group to do small hand-mades designed to be mementos of the discourse topic. This is a practice Susan and I have used extensively, and this website would allow individual groups to choose a memento activity and a governance issue separately to satisfy their choices. Packages with materials supplied for hand-mades. Freely, we hope. Don't want to explain unless you want more.

   Related blog would offer opportunity for sharing of such groups, cross-country, hopefully attracting more. All this freely accessible.

   We stopped updating our website last year when I realized how much I had to do. Susan's chair of her Criminal Justice dept. and so has less time than I do. But take a look at the website. Cats who Crochet was a group we were already starting, when we realized we had to go professional to make it work and treat it like an entrepreneurial project, but one that wasn't asking for money. We prefer to make what we do freely available, because in areas like community policing, the groups that produce the community discourse are what's important. Thus, freebies. Schools had it all wrong when they tried to sell the degree. They should be attracting students, not putting them into life-time debt.

   I know it's a huge project. Please don't give up on us. We're real. Susan's already working on a community policing project to start right now with her students this semester, and over the summer. I should know enough programming to be able to make this work. Honest. I'm just old and a little tired, but isn't this what retired professors whose students have carried on the teaching should be doing?

   Please do what Jwane did. Don't try to answer it all. Even I have a hard time getting my head around it. Just point out a path I need to go down, and I'll be able to ask better questions as I get through ProWordPress. I hope.

   Thanks for any help you can give. jeannie

6. timethief
   Member
   Mar 11, 2012, 1:36 AM

   @jeanniespace
   We Volunteers answer blogging support questions and what you posted above contains zero - zip - nada in terms of relevant information. This is what the pro bundle upgrade contains:
   Currently the $99 Value Bundle includes a 1 year subscription to:
   Domain Name & Mapping
   Space Upgrade
   No Ads
   Custom Design
   VideoPress
   http://en.support.wordpress.com/bundles/

   This is a comparison of the differences between WordPress.com free hosted blogs and WordPress.org installs for self hosting. http://support.wordpress.com/com-vs-org/
   Please read the information provided at those links and make your own decision.

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