If I have to be a dinosaur, let me be a cool one. I always thought Stegosaurus was one of the coolest looking dinosaurs, with it’s showy ridges of bony plates down it’s back, and that wicked spiked tail. You could just see it thinking, “Yeah, I’ve got your snack right here, you frakking tyrannosaur. Come get it.”
The last few weeks, I’ve felt more than ever like a dinosaur. I had this idea (some time ago) that it would be cool to launch my blog/website on Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday, which was the next day (at the time). I’d been learning about “professional” blogging — the kind where your blog is on your own website, not on the Blogger or WordPress sites. I already had my domain name registered, so all I needed to do was sign up for web hosting, install the blog software, and hit the ground running.
Ha. For all the information that is in the books and on the sites about blogging, what’s not in there is what I didn’t already know…and needed to. Like I didn’t know that the web hosting people would not automatically “move” my domain to their servers. First I called the web hosting people and asked them why my website was still a place holder. Then I found out I had to call the people I had my domain name registered with and give them the names of the servers to move my domain to. Ohhhh. And there were other things they didn’t tell me, like how to use file transfer protocol (FTP). And like how you have to have some kind of FTP software (and I hope I’m even using these terms correctly) on your computer, and an FTP account on your host server that can talk to the FTP on your computer so you can upload your files to the server. Ohhhh.
And then it turns out that there’s a button on the “cPanel” that says “Upload” on it, and all you have to do is click on that button and tell it what file to move from your computer to your site. Ohhhhh. Duhhhhh.
So my plan to launch my blog/website on Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday went belly-up. My first post was going to be all about Darwin and some of the things he wrote. I’m reading his book “The Voyage of the Beagle,” and my plan was to review the chapters as I went along. All that would have to wait, and won’t be as timely as a result. But, oh, well. It’s never a bad time to read a good book. I’m just hoping that the natural selection process of the blogoshpere is kinder and gentler than this “learning experience” has been.
