There are a few things I'd like to get out there before I begin, with the first being that starting this blog is very much about the exploration of and learning about SharePoint. What that means to you is that I am by no means an expert! There may well be different/better ways to handle the things I will talk about here, and I encourage you to leave feedback if you have ideas on how to better tackle anything I talk about here.
The other thing I'd like to throw out there is that I am a self-proclaimed "Champion of the Noob" (or newbie, if you prefer), having been one myself not too long ago and not so sure that I'm not still. As such one of the aims of this blog is to be as plain-spoken, detailed, and thorough as possible so that "even a noob could do it."
So, with the fine print out of the way, on with the post.
First, you may have noticed that my blog is not a stand-alone site, its housed under my user group site, www.hrssug.org. While good-intentioned folk have let me know that I can have my own space, possibly for free, I am fine with this space for now. Might I have to migrate later? Hopefully. Will it be a PITA? Likely. (urbandictionary.com can tell you what PITA means if you don't know.) Will I regret this later? Maybe. We'll see. In the meantime though, our user group site is kindly hosted by FPWeb (hence the logo- by the way, if your user group needs a SP2010 site, give them a shout). I bring that up simply to show that this blog is part a hosted site- and that influences what I can and can't do.
There were things that I had as criteria for my blog. First and foremost, I wanted it to be on SharePoint. There are a lot of SharePoint blogs out there that are not. I am sure there are reasons for this, but for me having a blog about SharePoint being on SharePoint just seemed like it made sense.
But, did it have to look like "SharePoint"? What about that ribbon business, isn't that kind of distracting for people who won't really be interacting with a site?
Those were my first 2 goals: make a blog that did not look quite so "SharePointy" and hide that ribbon from anonymous users. Each one will be addressed in a seperate post.
Before I get too far along, I'd also like to share my hopes for the blog's first round of enhancements- to add tagging, rating, and a "number of wrenches difficulty meter" like what you see on mechanics' forums (hey, I love my MINI!). I'd also like to add a Tweet stream, since that's the best way to keep up with me and the SharePoint Community in general.
tasha & evinrude →
I hope you find the information here useful, and maybe a bit entertaining. Let me know what you think!