Happy New Year!
On January 1st, I decided to start this website, “Baga.Town”. The idea is to make a collection of different endeavors. The hope is that this site will be filled with product reviews, guides, and for-sale items. Also, a way to promote books and other literary works.
I started with Nixihost to host this site because it offered inexpensive, straightforward pricing and the basic cPanel experience.
I have done web work in the past, but it has been at least five years since then.
My first mistake was jumping in too fast because my SSL certificate wasn’t working. Lesson learned, there is an email to verify my new hostname, which I did not see at first. There is also a toggle in CPanel to redirect http: to Https: that I clicked on. Finally, WordPress itself had the site set to HTTP rather than HTTPS. These things were corrected, and the issue was not seen again.
I have worked with WordPress before, but the block editor is new to me. I struggled, and it took a few days to set a header I liked. I tried various themes and site editors and watched hours of YouTube videos.
I played with everything and ended up dumping the whole site and starting over at least twenty-five times. This is easy, as the installation via CPanel takes less than a minute. In the end, I decided on the default 2025 template and did not use any widget editors. Their drawback is that they seemed limited until a payment was made, and honestly, they made things even more confusing. So I am starting bare-bones with a header and a search function, which I created using simple HTML.
Adding this snippet of code to the header made a simple search function for my site, which, to me, was much better than the search that could be added through the block
<form role="search" method="get" action="/">
<input type="search" name="s" placeholder="Search…" />
</form>Now that I won’t be dumping my site, I’ve added the JetPack and Updraft widgets and made my first backup to “Google Drive”. I will be researching whether I need an additional security plugin. It appears that many WordPress plugins are limited until they are paid for, and may cause issues. I would rather stick with the blocks that come with WordPress and modify with code if needed.
Learning more about the site all the time.
