About Symmetry
After some 2-3 months of developing this side journal blog of mine, I’ve finally finished and recently launched it a few weeks ago. This is Symmetry, a health and beauty side journal blog, dedicated to my revisiting (?) love for Asian skincare. It all triggered again when I started sampling out some Korean skincare products, thanks to my local The Face Shop store that introduced me to this vast world of Korean beauty. And of course, being that this is Asian skincare, I learned that beauty also starts from the inside, which reminded me of my current health. Therefore, I decided to share my love by opening a side blog.
For a side blog, Symmetry is a little elaborate. There are so many things to learn about health and beauty, let alone my own personal health and my somewhat intricate routine in taking care of my skin. And in addition, I’ve discovered so many wonderful and powerful skincare products competitive and comparable to those high-end brands that you can purchase from places like Sephora or higher-end department stores such as Barneys but very affordable. 1 The primary focus here is Asian beauty 2 and their daily techniques that make them a whole lot younger than their age. 3 For more information regarding this site as a whole, just visit the site and go to its This Site submenu.
You can also find Symmetry on my personal blog‘s nav menu on the top. The next section will explain why I added the link in my blog’s main menu.
Converting The ADRICULOUS Life to a multisite
An old friend of mine explained to me one day about WordPress multisites. Her main site is her portfolio and her network site (via a subdomain) is a personal blog. She saved quite a lot of time and money with this method: one domain, one web host, one WordPress software installed on the server, and two sites.
I’m already familiar with multisites from before but I never really thought I’d have a need for it, nor that I am confident enough to convert a standard WordPress site into a multisite. A WordPress multisite is one of the blogging/CMS‘s powerful features, in which you can host more than one WordPress blog/site via subdomains by using just one Dashboard.
In this case, I converted my personal blog into a multisite so I can host Symmetry as a subdomain. Because this health and beauty blog is a side-blog extension of TAL that it would save a lot of time, bandwidth, and space if I convert it into a multisite and then just add an additional blog underneath my domain and then maintain two (or more) blogs with only one dahsboard. This saves time, as you won’t have to remember multiple login information just to log into each of these sites. I just log in using my login info for TAL and Symmetry will already be there, ready to be taken advantage of.
I followed the WordPress Codex on how to create a multisite, as plugins with converting a site into a multisite don’t exist (yet?). It does take a bit of a learning curve, therefore it’s important that you need to pay attention to the instructions so that you would not get lost. In some way, I understood how to do it, but I would have to figure out a much simpler way to show others of this feature. Maybe an upcoming tutorial would be in the works in the future.
For web hobbyists, converting your WordPress-powered website into a multisite network would really help a lot with creating collectives. To a slight extent, even a network of fanlistings powered by WordPress. 4 I am aware that WordPress is a pretty bulky script, but with portions of recoding using Javascript and the React framework, the weight will slightly get less from time to time.
Check out the WordPress Codex regarding creating networks and multisite. You’ll see how this method can save your life with maintaining all your WordPress sites under the same domain.
On the sidenote…
- while some are cheaper than drugstore brands even! ↩
- such as Japanese skincare, Korean skincare, Taiwanese/Chinese skincare, etc. ↩
- being Asian myself, I also aim to do the same. ↩
- And yes, it’s very possible to create a fanlisting using WordPress or a small CMS script. I say this because they are often updated. The popular fanlisting collective PHP script, Enthusiast, uses PHP 5.2, which is now considered obsolete and most web servers will not accept scripts programmed using an outdated version. Most hosts today will only support PHP 5.6 or above. ↩
July 10, 2017 @ 9:56 pm
Symmetry looks awesome! Hopefully more documentation will continue becoming available for WP multi-sites as interest grows and more people start to use them.
July 10, 2017 @ 10:08 pm
Tammy (BZedfangirl in WDC) runs her portfolio and blog using the multisite method, and I got the idea from her. It took me some time to go through the WP Codex because sometimes their wordings are just confusing, but eventually I was able to make it work.
Also, I forgot to mention this. You know how when you log in WordPress.com, you get on the Dashboard and you see an option at the top somewhere that says “My Sites” on it? And then you have an option to add another WordPress.com site at the bottom footer that says “Add New Site”? The WordPress multisite system looks EXACTLY like that LOL. So pretty much, I made my TAL blog dashboard to look like the WordPress.com dashboard lol.