Technical triumphs in the blogging world!

While i was bouncing ideas in my mind about the topic of my next blog post, i thought why don’t i write about the adventure i have embarked upon on blogging itself. i have been wanting to create my online presence for quite sometime now. To be honest, it’s been exactly 6 months since i sat down chalked out how i’d like it to be. i have never promoted myself as a trainer and i thought it would be a good idea to start a dedicated blog and connect it to my social networking presence. So far so good.

But as long as it had to be planned on paper, all went well. But when it came to actually doing it online through the maze of features, widgets, plug-ins on blogging websites, the mind just stopped working. While the plan was clear in my head, putting that into practice was a challenge for a non-technical person like me. So as i was procrastinating on this worthy goal, i was also looking for someone who could help me start off and tide me through difficult times when i would get stuck with technology. i got a lot of quotes ranging from 4 to 5 figures depending on whether it was an individual or a web designing company.  None seemed to understand my unique needs and had standard quotes for standard services offered. 

So, after a lo-hot of postponement and genuinely busy times, this month seemed to be the best to finally get down to it. But i still hadn’t found the right person to help with trouble shooting when I required. Twitter to the rescue again. Lots of retweets and responses later, i came across a computer engineering student interested in blogging and social networking even though the university syllabus does not cover it. 

Enthusiastic and knowledgeable, as i realized in our first meeting, he initiated me into the world of Wordpress. He set me on track and was also willing to teach me things so that i was empowered to continue blogging, add pages etc. i wanted to first migrate my current blog from Blogger to Wordpress for practice. But i wasn’t convinced with the suggestion that we copy and paste each post and comment individually on to Wordpress. So i just let that be and asked him to take me through the labyrinthine ways of wordpress on the new blog i had registered. He got me through some of the basics, there are lots of them, and asked me to do a couple of things before he could help me further. 

i did not find time to do any more research for over a week after that. i finally sat down to watch tutorials and read articles on various aspects of blogging websites and their features. As i had suspected when i got huge quotes from companies, it’s all there on the web! It’s just about people who know it well and people like me who need to spend a lot of time figuring things out on my own. And since my website or blog is going to have content that i have and I do not want someone else putting it online for me, it has to be more of me spending hours looking up things and doing them on my blog. 

The real moment of triumph came today when i looked at another Blogger blog and found that it was similar, in some ways, to what i was trying to do. So i went around the internet experimenting with Blogger first. And lo! i actually created tabs on my blog!! i know it might not seem like a great thing for seasoned pros at blogging. But for a novice like me this was no less than an achievement. i don’t understand much about widgets and plug-ins but neat tabs on top of a blog always attracted me. i secretly wished i can have that on my blog someday….and here it is! 

So here i am celebrating my little victory and hoping to be a pro on WP someday too, mastering one bit at a time. 

PS: Why is technology so complex?