Sunday, December 9, 2007

On Blogging & Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks



Old dogs have trouble learning new tricks or so they say. In my case I'm finding this to be true. When I started this last month I didn't have a clue what HTML was and very limited knowledge of blogs. I knew blogs existed but hadn't read any. Through trial and error I've come to realize that HTML is a series of seemingly random letters and symbols that represent pictures and actions. How you can get a beautiful picture of the sky (for example) out of a bunch of letters and symbols is beyond me. I've found that you can cut and past these numbers & symbols and, at times, have things show up on your site. Other times nothing shows. I've come to realize that you need to know something about it in order to easily work through the blogging world. Knowing more would have helped me yesterday and the day before. Also having a broader knowledge of the workings of blogs and and so on might have helped.

I have posted 3 pictures on each of the last two entries in this blog. Yesterday's blog had to be deleted and done over because I couldn't get the pictures placed correctly. The words were all squished up in a 3 or 4 letter column beside the pictures. Needless to say that was unreadable. I am assuming now that, if you want to use a series of pictures with writing in between, the pictures must be in the middle. I'd also like to figure out how to downsize the pictures I place here, use thumbnail pictures. My nephew gave me the address of a picture shrinking place but the pictures turned out the same size as before.

I have another blog for my dog. I tried to have it here but our profiles kept getting mixed up. I'd fix my profile and it showed up on his. I'd fix his profile and it showed up on mine. After 4 days of fiddling around and reading FAQs I still couldn't fix it so his blog was moved to another place completely.

I think I'm going to go to Barnes and Noble or to Amazon and see if they have any of those Dummy or Idiot books for blogs. They have them for everything else! This is something that should have done before even starting. In the mean time I'll just keep plodding along here using trial and error to get by. Trial & error has always served me well, so no need to abandon it completely or look disdainfully down on it. :)

2 comments:

Darla said...

You're doing fine. I mean the words are showing up, that's the first step, LOL!

I too am a self taught blogger, trial and error. Sometimes I'm just the error.

There's an easy trick to posting links that someone told me about. If you need that particular info e-mail me privately at dbande7th@hotmail.com

It does get easier, I promise.

Darla

SandyCarlson said...

This is a very nice blog. I guess blogging is learned through word of mouth for the most part. I have found that asking Google my question gets me the answer pretty quickly!

Good luck on your journey!