Welcome to my new Blog, http://rjacquez.com

You may have noticed that your favorite Adobe Blogs are now sporting a new look and this is because we have finally migrated over to the popular blogging platform, WordPress.

With a strong ecosystem around WordPress, this is exciting news because there are so many more themes, widgets, plug-ins and overall community support available.

The more I learn about WordPress, the more I like it, and the more I want to tweak the various settings for a personalized experience. Since Adobe migrated my Blog, I have done quite a bit of research on WordPress, asked questions on Twitter, and watched quite a few video tutorials on YouTube.

One thing has become quite clear in all of this, namely, if I want total control of my Blog (i.e. super-admin rights), I really needed to host my WordPress Blog on my own domain and thus I have decided to launch this site, http://rjacquez.com.

The move has been exciting and no doubt a learning experience, but one I highly recommend if you are serious about Blogging, and frankly you should be.  

And although I didn’t take copious notes of the entire process, here’s an at-a-glance list of what it took me to launch this WordPress Blog on my own domain:

1. Domain Registration — I had owned rjacquez.com for a while now but until now it had only a single page pointing to my Twitter account. If you haven’t already registered a domain, I highly recommend that you use a single username for your web presence. As this article points out, "People who know you in one place can find you in others, you don’t have to remember different usernames for different websites." I strongly agree with this and have always made sure that everywhere I participate online, I always register, rjacquez, as my username, this is true on Twitter, FaceBook, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc.
2. Upgraded my Hosting plan to support WordPress — I use Godaddy for Web Hosting and upgraded to the Deluxe plan in order to support WordPress.
3. Installed WordPress — I don’t know what it’s like to install WordPress via other Web Hosting sites, but for me it was a breeze as Godaddy provides a simple link in the "My Applications" area for doing so. The installation took several hours and I received an email once it was all done.
4. Logged in as an admin — Once WordPress is installed, one of the first things you want to do is log in as an administrator and start customizing your Blog. To do so, just add /wp-admin to your domain (e.g. http://rjacquez/wp-admin/).
5. Selected and Activated a Theme — This is an important step and while I’m still looking for another theme, I settled on iNove and the feedback has been positive thus far.
6. Added a ReTweet and FaceBook Like buttons — I’m very active on Twitter and thus a ReTweet button is very important to me. Luckily WordPress has a plug-in for that so that it was easy to find it and install it. I also added a FaceBook button at the top of each post.
7. Migrated all of my Blog Posts — If you are just starting a new Blog, obviously this isn’t a required step for you, but for me since I have been Blogging for a while now, I was able to import all of my posts from Blogs.adobe.com/rjacquez to this new site. I was pleasantly surprised by how simple this process is. With the exception of losing all of my ReTweets, the process was pretty seamless.
8. Created a Blog Connection in Adobe Contribute CS5 —I personally find the built-in Editor in WordPress extremely limiting and so I use Contribute CS5 instead and highly recommend it.

   I hope you follow me along as I continue to share my experiences as an Adobe Product Evangelist.

Blog,rjacquez,WordPress