… was the name I created for this post when I saved the draft version 6 months ago. That is 18 months after I created this post about a local gifts website I was making.
After a year of occasionally dipping into the inner workings of WordPress (well when I say inner workings, I mean the surface level of the behind the scenes, no-where near the code and proper crazy stuff) and getting confused and frustrated each time, I had decided to call it a day. I was going to hang my hat up and forget I ever started Little Gifts, hopefully never bump into any of the people I had chatted to about being on it, and live a happy and peaceful WP-free life.
Everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked.
If you don’t get that reference, your existence isn’t as complete as you might have thought, but it was actually spammers and not Fire Benders luckily for me. 18 months after I started the site, I suddenly started getting three to four ‘registrations’ a day on the site. I ignored them at first, knowing I was eventually going to get around to closing it down, but after a few weeks I realised I didn’t actually have a registration form on the site. So how were they registering? And what were they registering to do? A quick pigeon to my brother came back with the reply that it was spammers, not people who were actually interested in my site. Initial disappointment over, I realised that now would be the perfect time to actually pull the plug.
So, on I logged, and before I could find the ‘burn-everything-to-the-ground’ button I had a little look around and thought that actually, it wouldn’t take much work to get the thing running smoothly. Not looking fantastic, but working enough to fulfil its original purpose – that of helping me (and may be others) to find small gifts and presents made by local-ish people (as opposed to being made in the mines under a mountain in China somewhere for a mega-corperation partially owned by McRonalds and Poke).
And after 20 minutes of semi-faff, and randomly picking settings, it was working! Success! Whoop whoop!
It’s not as swish and smooth and fancy looking as I’d like, and I still need to do things like add the logo, sort out the colour scheme in places, and theres some annoying stuff where if you click a picture it doesn’t take you to a url it just shows you the picture. But there’s no rush, they are just cosmetic things and I’m not a make-up man myself so … yeah, at some point I’ll renew the battle with WP.
But for now, like a slightly stunted Nemo-esk phoenix rising from the ashes, before there were actually ashes, or in fact fire, www.somelittlegifts.com is back on the net and ready to help with your Christmas shopping.
(Other gift-type-idea-sites are available, but quite frankly, I made this one and it’s to support your local craft/art/gift making scene, so check it out now.)