About This Blog

Submitted by Joy Insp on Tue, 08/17/2010 - 20:50

Read this first. It may help.

If you are visiting the blog for the first time, it may help you to know that my blog will make more sense if you start at the beginning (the oldest post) and work your way up to the present. I know, who has time to read pages and pages of blog posts? With that in mind, I have created this “About This Blog” post to bring you partly up to speed. The purpose of this blog is to share the process of creating a business from scratch and to invite you along for the bumpy ride. I am in the process of creating an online greeting card business. In addition to selling greeting cards, I intend to create Apps for Apple’s iPhone, iPod Touch and, hopefully, iPad. I want the ability to use Apps in tandem with my online business as well as to create games and productivity Apps. I am also re-designing my website with a different CMS (Content Management Software). In every case of the above and below, I am learning it all from scratch. When I began, I did not know how to create my own graphics, I did not know any programming languages and, though I have used CMSs before, I did not know Drupal. It has been a long, arduous and often, painful journey, and I've barely scratched the surface. Other obstacles that I am experiencing along the way have been a bare-bones budget and on-going health problems (the later of which I have yet to mention in my posts). Most of the blogs are titled "Update" with the corresponding date. I chose to do this so that in the event that I post something other than an update, I can use a different title. It keeps the updates separate from other posts. It also makes the URL path easier to identify as all update URLs are: /update-DDMMYY (as opposed to: /a-title-with-a-bunch-of-dashes). Each blog update then begins with it's own title in a noticeably larger font size. You can skim through the titles easily and pick one or two that may catch your eye. Currently my work schedule is four days on, four days off. I am trying to get in the habit of writing a "Day 4" summation update, this way if you don't want to read every post, you can read the Day 4 updates and still be kept current. There you have it, a basic description of what this blog is all about. If that is all you want to know, you can stop reading here and move on to the posts. If you would like more details on each project, please continue reading below. Thanks for visiting! Admin Be Inspired! Joyful Inspirations GREETING CARDS: I have been creating greeting cards for many years, but not at a professional level. Professional graphics, photos and illustrations are very expensive and something that I cannot afford so I have taken it upon myself to learn a variety of graphic design and editing programs so that I can create my own. At the time of this writing, I have put my graphic design studies on hold to focus on website design and programming. The software programs I am/will be learning are listed below: You will notice that more than half are Open Source. I wont go into detail on what that is, but I will mention that they are very sophisticated programs and they're all free.

    ~Poser, 3D Rendering
    ~InkScape, Vector Graphics (Open Source)
    ~GIMP, Photo Editing (Open Source)
    ~Scribus, Design Layout (Open Source)
    ~Bryce, 3D Landscape Modeling

PROGRAMMING: In the arena of Programming, I have to learn three different programming languages in order to create Apps. First, is the C language. The second is Objective-C. The third is SDK. The book that I am using primarily is the first book. The second book is one I refer to from time to time.

    ~Sam’s Teach Yourself C for Linux Programming by Sam's Publishing, copyright 2000 (there's a reason for this)
    ~Learn C on the Mac by Dave Mark

WEBSITE DESIGN: A CMS is Content Management Software for website design and administration. My CMS of choice is Drupal. It is a very powerful and complex CMS and has been challenging to learn. Though I am new to Drupal, I am not a stranger to CMSs. This JoyfulInspriations.net website was created in 2005 with Joomla! It's purpose has been and continues to be to inspire people to keep in touch with their friends and loved ones. With the power of Drupal, I will be able to sell my "Pure Joy" greeting card line by using Ubercart, an e-commerce module. There are many modules that I am using and discussing in my posts. In addition to Drupal and Joomla!, I have also created websites using PHP-Nuke, but that was a very long time ago. My primary learning tools for Drupal have been:

    ~LearnByTheDrop.com
    ~Drupal.org
    ~Various teaching videos on YouTube.com