BLOGGING: IS IT FOR ME?

After retiring again for the second time, I asked myself: what am I going to do (other than play a lot of golf)?

One of the answers is that I have a lot of thoughts on different things and (in my distorted opinion) some of those thoughts might be worth sharing with the world; or more probably, some few souls who somehow find these thoughts and don’t have anything better to do other than read them!

So, I have committed to myself to publish my thoughts about once a week. I am told that the way to do this is via a Blog.

Why in the world is this called a Blog and how did it get its name? I have no idea. I am sure that somewhere I could look it up but does it really matter? It is like calling a dog a horse. How did the smaller animal get named a dog and the larger animal get named a horse? It doesn’t really matter to us as long as we know which is which. So, a dog is a dog and a horse is a horse and a Blog is a Blog!

Not to deviate but how did a Podcast get named? What is a pod? The cast part I understand but Pod? Anyway, enough of that.

So, here I am and I have already written a Blog and published it on www.wordpress.com. The process of doing this was very easy on the surface. You just click on publish and cut and paste a document into the website. Of course I registered my account with a user name and password. I was lead to believe that people reading the Blog could subscribe to my Blogsite and all future Blogs would automatically come to them. Further, they could comment on my writings.

However, when I looked at the published site, many questions arose. What are all these terms like RSS, permalink, feeds, tags, and etc? There was nothing that said subscribe. Well, I decided to try clicking on these other things and when I did there was still not anything that was clear. I would have a lot of work to do on this to make it apparent to readers as to how to subscribe and how to make comments.

When I went on the hosting site for help, I got answers back that want me to use programming language and that assume I know what rss, permalink, feeds and tags are. Well, I don’t. It was a very frustrating process but I would somehow figure it out even if I have to get help from my daughter and son-in-law, who are fluent in this language and who reside in the blogger universe.

My conclusion is that bloggers and readers of blogs are a separate universe of people who have their own language. Here I am an outsider trying to break into their world; well, I will do it but it is going to take a while.

In the meantime, if you wanted to subscribe to my Blogs, click on every link you can find on this page to see if something comes up that you can understand and will do the job!

Urgent Update: I have switched sites and am now using www.Blogger.com. This site seems to have been designed for people like me who don’t know any of the technicalities (and don’t want to know any of the technicalities) but just want to Blog! So, if you want to subscribe, just click where it says subscribe and then in the next dialogue box click it again and that is it!

Blog on!

Ray