Technical difficulties

The learning curve on this blogging stuff is enough to make me bang my head against the desk.  I have to refrain though, because such indulgences freak out my cats and cause all the crap I have stacked up to avalanche to the floor. I have a hard enough time on a good day keeping Lightning McQueen from rolling off into oblivion.

My frustrations have been going on for days.  First there was picking out a template. Then there was writing the first post. Then I had to create links. At that point I realized I hated my template.  Two hours later, I’d found one I liked, but it lacked those cool little tabs across the top for pages, so I had to list them in the sidebar.  I hate to complain.  I know the WordPress guys are saying, “hey, we’ve got 69 templates to choose from.  Why can’t you be satisfied with one of those?”  Well, maybe because one that I liked had four columns and I couldn’t figure out how to keep them from repeating my “widgets” on both sides of the main body.  Several others had text that was hard to read, either due to color or size.  Inflicting blindness hardly seems like a good way to draw readers.

And then there’s the tiny problem of my perfectionist streak.  WordPress could have 100,000 themes and I still wouldn’t be satisfied unless I could manipulate them at will. Which I guess I could do if I knew how to use Cascading Style Sheets.  One project at a time.

Heh. I just realized that WordPress’s spellchecker doesn’t recognize WordPress as a real word. Gotta love that.

Don’t get me going about trying to incorporate text with photos.  I messed around with my racing page for hours and still couldn’t get it right.  Even when I switched from formatting in Visual to using HTML I couldn’t get the system to put white space between my paragraphs.  After floundering for eons, I finally clicked on the correct link and found out why.  The HTML is version 1.0, which won’t recognize things like the BR tag.  I know they’re working on adding features to WordPress, so maybe in time they’ll fix this problem, but for now you guys are just going to have to put up with whatever that page comes out looking like on your particular monitor.

My other aggravation has been the time it takes the page to refresh itself each time I save.  I have my computer set to the “Jungle” theme, so my “busy” icon, which would normally be an hourglass, is a little monkey, instead.  Every time I hit “save” that monkey pops up, swinging on his vine.  I’m getting really tired of watching that stupid monkey.

But, the up side of it is that I am starting to figure this whole mess out. I discovered how to create an “About me” section on the main page, and when WordPress tried to run it all together I learned that this was one place where I could use more updated HTML code, spacing the lines out, creating an actual heading, and putting the text in bold so it would show up.  Bwahahaha! I feel like I’ve pulled one over on the system. You have to claim your victories where you can.