Diary of a would-be blogger

New Year
I am very excited by the blog my sons have given me for my birthday. Every now and then I unwrap my present. I open the site and read their birthday greetings, chuckle at the cheek of them, admire the image on the home page, click on a couple of links and close it down again.

I was given this site because I am always going on about the stories I would like to write, the opinions I need to express. I feel we are often badly served by our media. After a glass or two I rant on about misinformation and the negative obsessions of the Scottish press. As an old newspaper hack I know there is morbid fascination in things that go wrong, and probably a public interest in finding out what happened and why, but how can we encourage success if we spend so much time looking at failure?

Did I say failure? I haven’t sussed this site yet. My birthday was November 13.

January 12
9.30 pm
I could be downstairs watching telly but decide it is time to try my first post. I go through the handy list Tommy set up for me – my idiots’ guide on a pile of stickies. Key in the admin name and password. Great, that works. Click on Manage. Mmmm, not sure what to do with these options. Click on Write. Oh, God, where to start?

Writer’s block and technophobia merge into one terrifying obstacle. Never mind. Press on. I create a new category, Community Politics, and it seems to work. So far, so good. Back to ‘Write’, batter out something, anything, the main thing is to get this thing launched into the new community of self-publishers.

10.45 pm
There, it is time to press the publish button. Now click on View Site.

Yikes. Where has the home page gone? Why does my new page come up with an option to ‘edit this’. For all the world to see? I fluster and fiddle about. Ray shouts at me from downstairs. Question Time is on the telly. I shriek back. He comes up to help. He usually sorts tecky problems without difficulty but backs off from this one.

11pm
I retreat to watch a panel picking over the remains of the Lib Dems leadership crisis and Ruth Kelly’s bubbling troubles in education. Followed by a little of the horribly compulsive Andrew Neil on This Week. Thank God he has gone from the Scotsman.

2am
Wake to worry about my blog. It suddenly seems very exposed. I imagine someone finding it by accident and clicking on ‘edit this’. There is something very unsettling about the thought that any Joe Blogs could pick up my words, add stuff or take it away and change the meaning of it. Come to think of it, just the kind of thing that can happen when you send a story to a newspaper.

January 13
I check out the WordPress helpline but take fright because it is mostly written in words made of numbers and I don’t have even a basic foundation in speaking geek.

January 20
Decide to cash in the voucher Tommy gave me for Christmas – the one that offers me free online support to get to grips with my blog. Any time. Except today because Tommy is busy organising FOUND his very technologically literate band for the album they are hoping to release. ‘Ask Rob’, he says.

Rob has a very good blog (robertsharp.co.uk) constructed from WordPress and somehow combines idealistic conviction with youthful scepticism. He is the inspiration for this site but I shrink from asking ‘one who knows’ when I am not likely to understand a word.

January 23
Finally pluck up courage to email Rob and ask him how I have managed to turn my site upside down.

January 24
Why did I hesitate? This is Rob’s reply.
No worries. What you’ve done is change the THEME that the site uses to display. It has been changed from ‘Default’ (the one Tommy created) to ‘Classic’ (which is how an older version of the programme was rendered.

The way to change this is to log-in to the admin part of the site…

… choose PRESENTATION …
… find the listing that says ‘Word Press Default 1.5’ …
… and click the ‘SELECT’ link.

January 27
It works, well kind of. At least the home page is back in the right place.

February 10
So what am I waiting for? I guess I am still a little scared of the technology. What if I mess it up again?