I'm a blogrrrrrrr

After thinking about it for weeks, I finally decided to start a blog today. Perhaps it's a brazen, even narcissistic undertaking, but I figured it would get me writing again, which I haven't done much of since grad school. Um, other than those threatening letters to school district administrators and those don't count because they are under subpoena.

Thus I began: I composed the world's most pithy, eloquent First Post, found a free blog hosting site, chose a clever name and lovely template, and then made the brutal discovery that I am a clueless dork.

Apparently, while I still reside in the land of "the internet is neat and I can use it for my own education and entertainment without really understanding how it all works," the rest of the world has zoomed past me on their way to "you gotta know html and the intricacies of all things web if you want to do anything, eat my dust.”

Let me recount the steps I took to learn this lesson:

1. Paste aforementioned eloquent First Blog entry into my shiny new blog’s boxy thingy.
2. Discover that the font gets progressively smaller and smaller and smaller for no explicable reason.
3. Look for way to control the font.
4. Repeat.
5. Repeat.
6. Read the “Welcome to the exciting world of blogging” page again and notice that there is a forum for troubleshooting. Apparently this is the place to go since, yes, I would like to shoot my trouble.
7. Attempt to enter forum with the username and password just created.
8. Repeat.
9. Repeat. Typing very carefully this time.
10. Repeat with caps off.
11. Repeat with caps on.
12. Curse.
13. Give up.
14. Come back with the thought that perhaps I need to create a different username and password for the forum even though logic seems to tell me that I should be able to use the same username and password as my blog and NO WHERE on ANY page has ANYONE hinted to me that Username A will be valid only for Purpose A while Username B is necessary for Purpose B.
15. Create Username B and include the word asinine in the password.
16. Spend 2 hours searching the forum for an answer to the mystery of the diminishing font. Do this while multi-tasking the usual mommy stuff: nursing baby, pulling slugs darling children out of bed, waging the Battle of the Breakfast, and driving said darlings to school (OK I didn’t take the laptop with me in the car so this was unitasking I guess).
17. Waste one more hour reading such helpful entries on the forum as…

This question’s been answered before. Try a search. [This search -- thank you very much -- was where I started. Would I still be looking if the 341 matches to my query had led me to an answer?]

and

Enter a style code in your stylesheet. [Oh and by the way you will be unable to find anything called a stylesheet no matter how hard you search nor how much your ego will be continually pelted with taunts of “you fool, this is so obvious a pre-teen could do this from her cell phone.”]

or my personal favorite

this code should do the trick:

p. head:
{
font = ez as
123
(u) = idiot
‘n@ nee n@
nee b00 b00'
:P
}

18. Face the reality that clearly there has been a club meeting and I was not invited.

Undaunted, I have resolved to persevere despite the mounting evidence of my own incompetence. I will not quit. I will blog! [insert Don-Quixote-absurdly-tilting-at-windmills simile here].

In the end, I gave up on the first free blog hosting site I had visited (Ha! that’ll show em, I’ll take my pithy blog and my $0 investment elsewhere. So there!) and found another that seemed a bit more friendly. The true test will be if they have a button that says “Complete ninnies who may or may not have master’s degrees from prestigious eastern universities but lack the ability to download anything without losing it among the black hole that is the temporary files folder on their computer ENTER HERE.” That’s where you’ll find me. Yup. And I’ll be typing away in a tiny tiny font.

Tags: blog, writing, dork, clueless