While I Still Can Remember

Somewhere in the past few weeks I decided I would like to try blogging. Why was that? I can’t remember. Which is a compelling reason for any kind of diary, blogform or not. Another notion I had, and still have, was that blogging might be helpful simply in terms of writing practice. And I also thought if I wrote about my studio work, I’d have plenty of documentation for the paintings I’m working on for our upcoming September show, Stone & Iron with my fellow artist and friend Jane Baigent at the Martin Batchelor Gallery here in Victoria. (That’s a working title at the moment, ahem.) In the process, I hoped, naively, I might even learn enough to make my own website, or at least, be able to make some informed decisions about the design.

So as a first step, I bought a software program for writing, MacJournal, which, so far, I like a lot. I think. It was easy to buy and it’s easy to use, sort of. The problem was that I had to decide on a blogging host in order to just get going. Not so easy!

A blogging host is a website that publishes bloggers’ blogs. (What is the word for the process of describing something in terms of itself- recursive tautology?)

There’s a tremendous choice for blog hosts, blog software, and blog themes out there in Internetland. For beginners like me, though, so much choice is overwhelming. I’ve spent hours, days! surfing, researching, reading. It’s like trying to swallow a pig whole (although I don’t eat mammals, so I’m only guessing).

Eventually, through a rough form of content analysis (as in how many times the same names showed up in connection with the search words FREE and EASY), my choice narrowed down to the websites Blogger and Wordpress (the hosted form). I chose Blogger because I liked the themes (the pre-made formats for publishing blogs) a little better and mainly because it won the coin toss.

(I’m skipping over the parenthetical part about the two days it took me to come up with a name for the blog that wasn’t already taken, but suffice it to say that I didn’t emerge unscathed. I am now the proud owner of four different and totally ridiculous domain names.)

Blogger IS easy to sign up for. But oh my, what an awkward little world it is to navigate in, with its tiny little writing window that is very unfriendly to drag and droppers, and unclear tabs and weird positioning of commands. I won’t say how many times I kept hitting the Create button when I just wanted to Sign In; I’m just surprised there wasn’t a buzzer and a flashing red sign spelling out GOTCHA! to enhance this new user’s happy learning experience.

I’m using MacJournal in order to avoid Blogger’s uncomfortable little window. MacJournal does lots of amazing things that are helpful to bloggers, although the program can be a little erratic, like a sensitive racehorse afflicted with flies. For instance, the text size randomly changes size and orientation at times, which frankly, makes me woozy. As well, I can’t seem to position my photographs in the text just the way I’d like. But that doesn’t seem to matter much because Blogger refuses to accept images from MacJournal anyway, no matter where I put them. MacJournal offered complex workaround instructions on two different web pages for this problem, with each partial solution consisting of at least 12 or 17 or 58 steps. Perhaps I exaggerate. The workarounds included signing up for more (MORE!) software (Picasa) which meant more sign-in forms and more usernames and more passwords and more email congratulations from remote web servers who really don’t care even if they say they do. The learning curve for this little project has increased exponentially every day.

In trying to track down how to insert images into my post, Blogger style, I discovered that you can’t insert images into an already uploaded post and furthermore, you can’t even cut and paste text OR images from your writing software into the tiny little *&@#$!! Blogger writing window. It only took another two hours of random Google research, signing up for yet more user forums and waiting to be accepted etc. before I came across a useful comment in a user group forum about the cut and paste difficulty (as in not working); I’m so sorry, but I don’t remember where. Because in order to remember, you have to remember to remember and also keep notes. Which I seldom do. But thank you whoever you are in Googleland who supplied this solution. Because part of my problem with cut and paste seems to be the way Safari works, or doesn’t work with Blogger. If you use Mozilla’s Firefox (yet another new application to learn)as your Blogger browser, cut and paste seems to work just fine in the tiny little *&@#$!! Blogger writing window. But not pictures. There’s another five or six or seven step procedure (per picture) which inserts the pictures into your blog exactly where you don’t want them until you get hip to cursor placement. The only way I’ve found so far to reposition the images is to slide and scroll them a few lines at a time. It’s about as easy as pushing peanuts with your nose.

But signing up was really, really easy. I know, because I did it at least sixteen times.

Eventually I expect I’ll figure out how to do this process a little more gracefully, and in time I’ll probably forget just what it was that was so difficult because I’ll have learned the right moves (hopefully). Meanwhile this learning to blog process has been so cumbersome, I don’t even WANT to remember it even though right now I still can.