[January Jumpstart Day 8] Pleasures from figuring out WP blog stuff on my own.

When I started blogging I had zero idea what I was doing having never blogged, created a website or done anything like this before.
Yes I’m techy and I can do things like build computers, install windows/linux along with some other software related stuff, but setting up a WordPress blog was new to me and I knew it was going to be a learning experience.

I, for better or worse settled on the .com (would .org have been better for a starter blog?) version of WordPress and got to work trying to create what would be my blog.
For the first few days I played about with pages, posts and various options until I got to grips with how things worked in a basic sense, knowing I would learn more as I went and really just wanting to get something up I could share with people and use for posting.

After a while of tinkering I created what I feel was a nice looking blog. I had a self created logo/header, a functioning menu system and it looked good while also being easy for me to add to when I, say participated in a new meme and wanted to add it to my menu.
Having stuck with the design for several months I noticed over Christmas that category sections showed up as one long vertical list titled archives whereas my main page was laid out in a grid and showed parts of 4 posts before you needed to scroll which in my eyes was what I wanted all pages to be, so hopefully any visitors would see more of my post and click on them and read.

Having googled my issue of wanting to change the layout from a vertical list to a grid style all I got was results with CSS code which weren’t useful, and so even with a look round the options myself I couldn’t see anyway to do what I wanted and let it be till now.
I then put out a tweet asking for help as some of my followers also use WP and I thought they would maybe know how I could do what I wanted.
Having got a DM with some help I had already tried it came up that they might be able to help via teamviewer the next day which I was happy to do if it meant they could help.

The same night I went back to WP and was playing about with pages when the solution appeared to me and it was so simple that I don’t know how I never saw it before.
When I created a new page I set it as a blog page which was auto-populated with just all my blog posts in the grid style I wanted, from this I clicked on a post in the grid which opened up some new block settings one of which was the option to specify a category. and when I did so the page kept the grid but the only content shown was posts in the category I had set which was exactly what I wanted.

From the above I edited the page a little and saved it whereby I just copied it multiple times over and then editing each one so that they had all the different categories I had.
Once I had a page for every category I had to then edit my menu whereby instead of using categories I used the newly created pages.
After all this was done I had achieved exactly what I wanted to do in making more posts visible and making my site overall much nicer in the process.

The relief and pride I had wasn’t huge but I was happy that I managed to figure things out on my own. Yes I had googled and yes I had asked for help which may have solved my issued but in the end I did it, I figured it out and learned a skill through trial and error which for me is the best way to learn unless it’s something important

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