Common Sense, Dancing

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.

You may have heard my emails and such were hacked. I’m still traumatized by the experience, and the trust has been destroyed between my PC and me. So I decided to join the young, hip kids. . .and I bought an iMac yesterday. I think I may love it, but I’m still not sure because I’ve got so much to try to pry out of the old PC — it’s making me very nervous to think about leaving it behind as I march off into the New World of Mac. I’m so nervous, in fact, I’ve got the PC up and running next to the sexy new Mac. (Trust may be gone, but it’s all I’ve known for so long…how do I begin again with someone something new?)

First, I must say those people at Apple have the design thing down. If only everything in my world were this sleek and clean (myself included). This computer is gorgeous. And when I finally disconnect my PC, the amount of space I’ll have on my desk will be crazy. I might actually be able to use the desk for something other than holding small bundles of papers to be filed. However, I remain perplexed by the mysteries of the Mac operating system. (So much so, I don’t even know what it’s called.) Why will it not recognize my external hard drive? My life would be so much simpler if they all could just get along. I have a date with the boys at my local Apple store — I hope to be learned by the end of the week. (Ok, more learned. Ok, less ignorant.)

My iTunes remain trapped in the external hard drive. This isn’t so bad — it’s only upwards of 6,000 songs (you do the math). The thing is, I do know how to move it back to the C drive so it can be transferred to iMagical — the problem is, I’m of the “fool me once shame on you, fool me twice…” mentality (or “once burned, twice shy,” choose your cliche). The only reason iTunes is on an external hard drive in the first place is that *I* moved it. It would stand to reason that *I* can move it back, right?

Well, maybe the old me. The new me has had enough technology in the past 6 weeks to last a lifetime. I’m fatigued. (I’d use the phrase “battle weary” but there’s been no one shooting at me, so I’ll refrain from the overly melodramatic. I’ll stay *this side* of melodramatic.) I’ve registered a domain; left wordpress.com for another host; crashed the blog; lost my index file (whatever that is); found it again; resurrected the blog; changed the theme; messed around with code when I had no business doing so; been hacked; survived the hack; secured one account and fought with Google about another; opened a third email account; provided a government ID to Facebook to confirm, Yes, it’s me; spent hours and hours figuring out who needed to know the new me is now hotmail and not yahoo or gmail (and I’m still not done)….The most impressive thing about this list is that we all must keep in mind I understood only about 50% of what I was doing. Thank goodness I’m only messing around on a computer and, oh yes, parenting four children. Imagine if I was in charge of FIFA’s referees, the Gulf cleanup, or the Israeli blockade. Yikes.

And it’s only the end of June, people.