Adventure #87, #88, #89 - The Vampire Website

I've always had a strong interest for vampires. Well, always, at least for a very long time. Even as a kid I liked them. And then when I was around 11, I saw the movie Interview With the Vampire which immediately entered my top favourite movies of all time. Now, I almost feel lame sometimes when I tell people I love vampires. With all this twilight-mania, I'm quite sure people imagine that I worship a poster of Edward Cullen in my room.


Don't worry, I will probably always think that these shiny vampires suck.

Anyway, this weird passion for vampires led me to do many researches about legends, understand where they come from and quickly discover how fascinating they became thanks to literature. Novels, essays, movies, series, I can't get enough. As I was looking for some vampire stuffs on the internet a few months ago, I realised that apart from one website, nothing was really good or interesting. All the websites dealing with vampires seem to have been made ten years ago and only to please goth teens in pain with animated bat gifs or bleeding roses.

When you can't find what you're looking for, just make it yourself. This is very often how I see things. So I decided to create my own vampire website. I spent two years working for a network of blogs and websites, so I know the basic thing to know to make a website. But I had never created one by myself (well, I created this one for The New Project, and it was actually adventure #37 but since we're using Blogger, Google's free tool to create blogs, it was pretty simple). For the one vampire website, I wanted things to be a bit more serious and own the domain and everything. So I had a lot of things to learn and I'm quite proud to say that I figured everything out by myself (not without a long a painful process though).

#87 : Buy a domain name and host the website
I decided to host my website with OVH as I knew it and people using it. It's very simple to do but still took me some time. You just need to enter the name you would like to have, then OVH tells you if it's available, then you if you want to host it with then, you just choose the best package for you and pay the subscription. And you become the proud owner of a new domain name. Because I was doing this for the first time, I was being extra careful and checking everything several times and looking for stuffs I didn't understand well. And then I had to start over again because the French website didn't want me to have an address in the UK and other annoying details like this just ended up in me spending a lot of time getting crazy on my computer. But hurray! I did it! More complicated things were coming though

 #88 - Install Wordpress
I have worked on Wordpress in the past and like it so here again, my choice was already made. I was following a tutorial I had found on a website and which seemed pretty good. Apparently, you're supposed to be able to install Wordpress in five minutes.
Yea, sure.
Maybe it's me who has a weird brain not thinking like other people or maybe the tutorial was not that well made in the end because I had a lot of problems to manage to actually have my website online. Picking up bits of information everywhere, trying different things, I finally managed to do it. And was very surprised when it worked but I was quite sure I was trying again something I had already tried right in the beginning. Anyway, the most important is that I did it. Without even having to call for help. And now, yes, I could probably install Wordpress in five minutes.
First times... always painful.

#89 - Design, topics etc
Creating the website was just a start. Once it's here, you have to do something with it. That's the thing with internet, sometimes you can't see all the work hidden behind the pretty pictures and nice talks. I didn't create the whole design myself (I am far far far from being able to do this) but choose a theme already made and changed the pictures so that it would look more vampiry, and by the way had to learn how CSS works, which I was not very familiar to. I also had to spend some time thinking about what and how I wanted to talk about. This website is still a baby and even if I know what I want it doesn't show very well yet, I still need time to be more confident so I'm writing stuff I may change later. But step by step, it's being built. And now, I don't feel like I have all this useless knowledge about vampires in my head. At least, I'm doing something with it. I also have an excuse to watch Buffy over again.

Oh, and of course the moste important, a link : Drops of Vampire Blood. It's only in French at the moment but making it in English is a plan for when I will have the time and the energy necessary.