I’m about as tech savvy as the rest of them. Or so I thought. Look IT is not my chosen career path, and in my defence, when I call the IT guy at work, his first question is usually, “Andrea, is it plugged in/switched on/are you holding it the right way up?” Also his title is way more sophisticated than “IT Guy”, and speaks to his key role in making sure that none of us do anything silly and accidentally leak corporate secrets online or blow up our hardware – which makes me feel even more ridiculous when he asks me whether it is plugged in/switched on/right way up. I digress. All things considered, as someone with an alternative career path to IT, I can switch on my laptop, create a document, save it, edit it and find it again later. I can even make my way around spreadsheets as well as some pretty cool online programmes that my company uses. When I am not working, I can navigate social media, send and receive memes, watch a virtual safari or Graham Norton on You Tube and even manage to log on to the D6 communicator for my daughter’s school. I can write a little story and save it as a Word Document. Basically I can do anything I need to be able to do to create a blog, right? Wrong!
Even with the simplest and easiest web design, creating a blog is complex AF. Until a few days ago I thought that a site and a page were the same thing and that you could cut and paste a URL. I thought the terms “design”, “theme” and “customise”, although not meaning the same, were all involved in the same process. I thought a category was a section of a menu, and I thought a widget was something you bought at KFC. Nevertheless I began at the beginning and soldiered on step by step, until I got to the part where it said “click here to launch site”. I clicked. I went offline, I went back online and looked for my site. Up popped a chipper “jolly hockey sticks” message that said “OOPS! THAT PAGE CAN’T BE FOUND. It looks like nothing was found at this location. Maybe try a search?” I tried a search with the same result. Dammit! I decided that there might be a special IT guy living in cyberspace who has to check these things before you can create the page. You know, in case you want to call your blog “how to make a bomb” or “biological warfare 101” or some such. Then I remembered that you can find just about anything online – I mean my friend’s 8 year old had learned how to do a knee replacement online. It became increasingly unlikely that there is a little cyber man checking stuff out – unless of course he works for the CIA or MI6 and is monitoring global terrorism. Even so, I’m sure they wouldn’t be interested in my “Navigate77” blog. I pondered this as I went to sleep.
I woke up and tried again. I tried to link it to my facebook page – it didn’t work. Then something popped up to say I hadn’t written anything yet, so I couldn’t link anything. So here I am writing a damn post about not being able to post, so that I can try to post it. Basically I am trying to tell the site I think I have created that it is a real site, in the hope that it will be seen. So if you are reading this, then I have been successful. If you are not reading this, there is a strong chance that I have changed my domain name to “assassinationtechniquesforchiropractors.com” and am talking to the cybersecurity guy from MI6 and asking him how to set up my site properly.
