Does everyone who starts blogging think about it 24/7 at first? One little step into the blogosphere and I was gone. Within an hour it was like an addiction — I thought about it all the time, everything happening in my life was accompanied by a stream-of-consciousness blogging entry. The excitement was unbearable — all the stories I’ve been wanting to tell, all the people I’d love to connect with! My creative juices started flowing overtime!
But I had to learn how! That led to yet more obsession — how can I find out what this means, how to do that? There were frerequent visits to the WordPress FAQs and forums, where I usually couldn’t even ask the right question. I couldn’t learn fast enough!
WordPress advised (somewhere in their documentation) that I take my time. Absolutely knowing that was the way to go, I was powerless to slow down whatever it was that blasted me with such force into the blogging world. If only I had my very own tech geek and expert seasoned blogger available all the time to answer my questions!
All of the things I needed to do, and even usually loved to do, became an obstacle to my overwhelming desire to blog, learn about blogging, and worse yet learn about all the wonderful webthings I’d never known about before — Digg, Flickr, Technorati and on and on. Wow, wow, wow!
I began to fear I’d never get back to “life as usual”, and now I know I won’t, but am happy to say that there’s a bit more balance in it. Not only do I leave the computer to do things I absolutely have to do like eat, I am getting back to my work and even things I enjoy like knitting. My Meyer lemon tree did suffer from the freezing temperatures at night as I did not get out to buy a tarp and protect it, but it’s a fairly small consequence of this blogging mania in the overall scheme of things.
And now, I’m actually remembering that I do have some important things to do in my business today. Will I finish this post and go straight to business, or will I view some other blogs and post some comments? Only time (and a couple of clicks) will tell!
When I began blogging 9 months ago I knew zero. I found the codex to be dense and confounding. IMO it was written by geeks and for geeks. The instructions I got were for using the text rich editor and I did not have any html. I switched to the normal editor and started to use a free offline editor BlogDesk which supplies all coding at the touch of buttons and I created a new blog http://bloggersblurt.wordpress.com that has simple instructions for learning how to use wordpress technology. The instructions are aimed at the barely computer literate who lack coding skills. I spend hours every day on the forum answering questions now and when I note that there are the same problems cropping up repeatedly I post simple instructions on this blog. Perhaps you will find the wordpress resources articles I have posted there to be helpful.
Thanks for your help in the forum, timethief! I had just added your blog to my blogroll before reading your comment here and hope new bloggers like myself can find your blog easily. As I’ve been going through this process, I’d been hoping to find simple instructions such as yours, and feel it will be a great service in general for more people who “know zero” to be able to enter, enjoy and contribute to the blogosphere.
I look forward to spending time at your blog!