That’s it! I’m done! Askthefatty.com has been simmered, seared, fried, baked and grilled to perfection! The backend stuff is all done, my theme modifications are up and not hideous, and I’m working on my first set of reviews now. It’s been a long, tasty road, but we’ve finally arrived. Ask the Fatty is officially open for business! So, what went into making this fever dream a reality? So glad you asked!
First, I had to see if the domain was free, and if so, register it. Nice and easy, two minutes and you’re done. After registering it, I set up my existing webhosting account to host the askthefatty.com domain. Here’s where the tomfoolery began. Apparently there was some kind server side misconfiguration that prevented the domain from resolving properly. Neither myself or the tech support team could figure out how it happened, but they were able to correct it on their end. Success! The domain resolves! Now to set up WordPress!
Right. WordPress. I’ve had many glorious battles with WordPress as I’ve documented on my personal site, so I expected some shenanigans when I set up WordPress here and I wasn’t disappointed. The first problem I was having was that the install kept failing because of a mySQL error. Turns out that domain configuration problem from earlier was screwing up the resolution of the hostnames for the mySQL databases. Tech support was able to ninja kick that into submission again and made sure that any related issues would be taken care of. WordPress now installs. Huzzah!
The hard part is over, right? Err… not quite. So I get the site set up and pick a theme, which went by pretty quick, but I wanted to modify the theme so that it was more unique to the site. Turns out those nice looking boxes and stuff where all the text is? Yeah, some are hard coded into the theme (YAY!), but the main box with the title bar and the page heading were part of the background picture (NOOOO!). What’s that mean? I have to go learn GIMP so that I can re-create those boxes on my chocolate background picture. I probably put in about 4 hours or so of work getting that thing right. I’m not 100% satisfied, but I think it’s at the point where the imperfections are ones that I’m seeing and that no one else will notice because they haven’t been staring intently at it for hours on end.
Now what? Now, we adjust some easily adjustable theme elements and placing (still tweaking here, minor stuff; a few boxes may change location), upload my hilarious background, type this up, and start working on the reviews! That’s where we stand now. I’m organizing some notes and thoughts for my first three reviews and looking at prospects in both LI and NYC for future reviews.
Oh, and there was some talk earlier about cake. See… what had happened was, I got this cake from a local bakery, right? Chocolate of course. And it was good cake. So I’m thinking, I take some pictures of the cake and maybe of me eating the cake because it’s a celebration! But um… well, this is embarrassing… I uh… I kind of ate the cake and forgot to take pictures. It was really good cake. I started typing this post, took a bite of the cake, and I was like “OMG THIS IS DAMN GOOD CAKE!” As I once described a slice of chocolate cake I had at work, “It tastes like happy.” And it did. It was really good cake. Like, really good. But I uh… I ate it all pretty quick and forgot to take pictures. :( I’ll be going back to the bakery and giving them a proper review a bit later, like when I live down my shame.
But hey, the site is up and running and officially launched! Yay! Let’s focus on that and not my cake devouring ways! Three cheers for askthefatty.com!