Too much to learn, too little time!
You hardcore bloggers are all nuts!
Okay, so the rest of the world figured weblogs out back in 2003 and so everything is old news to everyone, but for me it is a brand new world. I finally got with the picture way back in, oh, let’s say a couple of weeks ago. This is really kind of funny because I’ve been using the Internet for many, many years. I remember when Lynx was the browser of choice and everything was text. I had a bulletin board system (BBS) back in the 80s and I setup a gateway on it for people to access the Internet. Yep, that was a long time ago.
It’s not like I didn’t stay up with what was happening, but I do use technology and the web extensively in my career in IT. I guess the thought of online journaling really didn’t have tremendous appeal to me, in fact, I thought bloggers were nuts. I glanced at a few, saw a few news reports where people said stupid things, watched how the pedophiles have discovered Myspace as a new playground, and went about my way.
So I built a personal website, instead. I used a site builder tool and YUCK…I pretty much can’t design. (Of course, I have always known that. GIVE me a design and I can build to it, but coming up with something new, not my cup of tea. I just can’t see it, not creative enough, I don’t know.) I decided I wanted to mess around with the website and try a few things. I ended up working on a couple of pages and then got bored. 
But while I was messing with the site, I was having to play with Linux, which was nice for a change. You see, I’m an old UNIX guy. I moved to Windows exclusively when I took a job with a company that is 100% Windows so I left the UNIX stuff behind about eight years ago. Well, since my site is hosted on a Linux server, that gave me a chance to reawaken some of the fondness I had for the non-Microsoft world.
As part of my playing around, I accidentally loaded WordPress. It had all of these PHP files and I hadn’t seen one of those before, so I had to play around with them and see what they do. Now two weeks later, I’m not sleeping at night, I’m surfing blog sites like mad, bookmarking useful things, trying plug-ins and widgets, and generally fiddling with everything and refusing to go to sleep until I have solved the evenings quest–which means I’ve been sleeping about two hours a night for the last two weeks.
This is nuts! You people that have been blogging for years have created an entirely different world, i.e. the blogosphere. I had no idea things were so advanced with this stuff. What, with pings and trackbacks, bridges, permalinks, tags, and about a billion different social network things, how is a late comer like me ever hope to catch up and not wither and die from lack of sleep?
Along the same lines, all of you guys and gals that have been doing this for a while have already created all of the cool stuff. I mean, what’s left to develop? Every time I think “hey, it would be cool if I could _________”, I just do a quick search and discover that there are already a half dozen people that have done it and released it to the world. I’m undaunted however, I will find something useful that the rest of you haven’t discovered and I will be the first one to publish it. (Do yourself a favor and don’t hold your breath waiting on me…it might be a while!)
I’m still playing with a lot of stuff here so as I decide what works and what doesn’t, I’ll write about it and why I felt it doesn’t fit me and my purposes. Hopefully I’m not the absolute last to come to the table and some insight I can provide will help some poor sucker. Until then, thanks to all of you that have gone before and created all of these new toys!
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