Ok, so here goes the first blog post on the new site.

I’ve finally decided to create a website for all sorts of stuff, reviews of products I own, learnings in web and graphic design, photoshop and flash tips, rants, cars, and more.

Why, you may ask? Because I think it’s good practice, and I hope I can share some of the stuff that I spend time learning and figuring out. There are a million (well more, actually) of these out there, but I’ll try to give this one a little love and find a few things that might normally not get online.

Here are some of the decisions I’ve made so far in creating this site. (this will probably change over time, so I’ll create new posts to talk about what I’ve changed and why).

Host: Dreamhost
Reason: I found a $10 deal for a year’s hosting and it came with a domain, great deal!
Learnings: So far its been excellent, signup was a breeze, wordpress installation was super simple and everything has worked flawlessly.

CMS: Wordpress
Reason: Very popular and seems to have lots of support, plugins and is easy to use.
Learnings: This is my first experience with Wordpress and so far I’m impressed. Adding plugins and widgets has been easy, though getting commenting working though Facebook Connect took a bit longer than some of the other ones (still only took around 20 minutes). I used the Facebook Connect Wordpress Plugin from Sociable! and modified it slightly. I have also installed the Wordpress Twitter widget (more on that next).

I still haven’t quite figured out Twitter yet, everyone talks about it like it’s the Current Big Thing but I’m not so sure. It looks to me like a public instant messaging and status update service. To me, this blog can serve as my public messaging system, and my status updates are done on Facebook. This led me to try and figure out a way to turn my Facebook status updates into tweets, that way I only have to update one thing, and let’s be honest, I’m on Facebook a heck of a lot more than I’m on Twitter at the moment.

To solve this problem I found out that you can get your status updates as an RSS feed by going here: http://www.new.facebook.com/minifeed.php?filter=11 (make sure you log in to Facebook) and clicking on the “My Status” under the “Subscribe to these stories” header. That gives you the RSS feed to your status updates. The next step was to sign up for TwitterFeed, that let me specify an RSS feed to use to update my Twitter account with (every 30 minutes), I just pasted in the RSS feed I got from Facebook, and there you have it, Facebook status updates on Twitter!

I’ll continue to write update posts like this as hugeawesome.com evolves, it should be interesting to see what happens next!