Common Sense, Dancing

It’s raining today, which seems to fit my mood. Having returned from the Bloggy Boot Camp session held yesterday in Philadelphia, I have a bit of thinking to do.

I knew this would happen: I was in a room with women who’ve been blogging a lot longer, who have found their “tribe,” and who seem (“seem” is of course the operative word!) to have it all together, and I felt….well, less than.

I spent some time listening during the sessions and trying to figure out what I wanted to do next with my writing. Did I aspire to develop a huge stable of PR connections, product reviews/giveaways/review? Did I aspire to make millions thousands a few bucks by offering advertising on my page? No, no, no. Many times no.

I decided that what I want to do with this .com is to write. To have a place where I can post my observations, thoughts, ideas, jokes, and practice good writing (or at least not bad writing). I want to have a place that is uniquely and distinctly *me*, where, after I’ve been hit by a bus, people can go to hear my voice when it has faded from the cacophony.

[A post for another time: What is it about this time in history, 2010, where we all feel that we need/deserve to be uniquely heard? Did women in 1950 have that place? In 1980? In 1880? Certainly to “be heard” is a human need, but how do we avoid becoming the ridiculous or irrelevant or overexposed voice, a la Snooki, or a nutty pastor from Florida, or anyone else hogging the cyber limelight? Like I said, another time.]

So — this site is perfectly in line with my desire to Live Forever. I’m fully aware that I will not live forever, but it is a goal so I continue to go to the gym, battle my weight, and look both ways before crossing the street (lest I get hit by that bus, referenced above).

And, as a perfect tool to support my blog AND my Live Forever goal, I found the most amazing plug-in, called (darkly) Next of Kin. According to the plugin’s developers,

Next Of Kin is the plugin we don’t want to install. It handles what happens after we die. It monitors your own visits to your wordpress system, and will send you a warning email after a number of weeks (of your choice) without a visit. If you fail to visit your blog even after that, the system will send an e-mail you wrote to whomever you choose.

Apparently, if you fail to log in, you get a warning email, and then if you fail to respond to that, your Next of Kin gets an email telling them that you’ve disappeared from BlogLand and could they please poke around and tell you to get back over and log in.  Part of me is secretly horrified by this, but a larger part of me is hugely amused — particularly as I get to compose that Next of Kin email.

I figure, should I fall deeper into a funk of blogging ennui, it will get me away from The Price is Right and back to writing. If for no other reason than to avoid the “Alyson appears to have expired, please go crinkle a Cheese Doodle bag near her head and see if she responds” kind of message to my husband, children or mother.

When I was younger, there was nothing I liked better than rearranging the furniture in my bedroom. I’d go upstairs, ostensibly “to bed,” and I would push-pull-lift-and otherwise maneuver the furniture in my room until the room didn’t resemble itself. This behavior continued through college, in my room in the House of Y (ah, the House of Y. A post for another day.)

So, yes, I’ve done it again. Sorry. I chose another theme, and have wasted, er, spent, several hours this late afternoon reformatting and updating to this theme –Twenty Ten from the fine folks at WordPress. Why did I switch? Well, aside from the novelty of moving the furniture around, so to speak, I felt compelled to change when I was surfing my own site and noticed some things that had me scratching my head. And then wailing silently in that same head when I had to admit I don’t know enough code to figure out how to change these “things.”

After completing the switch out of wordpress.com  to another host in the past several months, I continue to learn more and more about this medium — about this mysterious “code”, about themes and widgets, about plugins….I’m doing a lot of learning. And just when I think I’m getting it, something happens and I know I don’t have it. So the lesson that I inadvertently learned today was that the theme’s designer can, apparently, put buttons on the my site that link to things that s/he thinks are important. Now, I totally understand, and support, a designer’s right to have his/her name on my site — s/he’s the designer, after all, and generously put the theme out there (for free!). I have no problem with that sort of self-promotion. What I do object to is that the designer apparently put buttons down in my site’s footer that sent you — when you clicked — to a magazine website and also to the designer’s website. For some reason, I never noticed these buttons until today — which leads me to believe that they are relatively new — because long before today I had been dwelling on the footer (I had been trying to crack the code that would allow me to modify it but I surrendered to the mystery that is the editing box for the theme).

I have signed myself up for Bloggy Boot Camp in Philadelphia in September, and I’ve been lurking a bit on the SITS Girls site. I’m realizing I have so much to learn, and it seems like it’s an enormous task to learn even a fraction of it. While I have no delusions of grandeur — I don’t aspire to make money off this site (it’d be a nice bonus, but it is not my intention) — I would like to have a blog that I can be proud of, that makes me think, that spurs others to think and leads them to other interesting sites authored by other wise and interesting people. I feel like the folks over at SITS can really help me create that space.

For the time being, I’m taking baby steps. So far, I’ve moved my own site (yay me!), crashed it (boo!), got it back up (yay!), got hacked (double boo!) and recovered from that. Along the way, I’m learning a helluva lot — about blogging, about code, about hosting sites, evil hackers, and how good people inherently are.

Baby steps, friends.
Just don’t stub your toes while I’m rearranging the furniture.