In Which I Tackle Technological Challenges by Nancy L. Eady

 I am convinced that most technological items, like remotes, have a gender bias that allows them to work perfectly for males but mess up when females follow the same steps the males did. For example, we have a very scary universal remote. I couldn’t find it while writing this blog, but the Sony remote from our TV (which fortunately we never use) is just as scary-looking.

Using this, my husband can turn on our devices effortlessly. I can follow the same steps, but it won’t work for me. Ergo, it has a built-in gender bias. My husband laughs at me, but I remain convinced.

In an ironic twist of fate, I manage the IT equipment, computers, networks, internet phones, and monitors at my office. I won this honor for two reasons. First, I learned early that 95% of the technological problems that occur with a computer are fixed if you unplug it, wait a little while, then restart it. For the other five percent of problems, I work diligently to be sure we have very good vendors we can call for problems. Second, when IT vendors throw out acronyms or terms I don’t understand, I stop them to ask what the acronyms or terms mean. I’m not trying to make their life difficult, but how can I decide if I don’t understand what they said? Sometimes, it’s funny to see the look on their face as they try to explain a term that no one has ever asked them to define. One word they often use that makes me cringe is “leverage.” “We will leverage such-and-such to accomplish so and so.” Just substitute the word “use” for leverage and you’ve got the meaning down.

But I digress, as often happens. In spite of my technological handicap, besides blogging for Writers Who Kill, I have in the past written two blogs of my own, workingmomadventures.com and footballnovice.com. I accidentally let the domain registration for The Football Novice lapse, and it has been several years since I published more than sporadically in Working Mom Adventures. I want to write more for Working Mom, but when I tried to do a lengthy post last year, I realized that the user-friendly Wordpress.com platform I started out with in 2010 has morphed into something I have trouble using. And because I didn’t renew my domain name for the Football Novice in time, I lost every single one of my football posts. I cannot tell you how much it irritates me to write something I know I have written before but lost. It never comes out the way the first one did, and to me, it’s never as good. I’d like to revive that blog as well, but figured it was hopeless because of the lost posts.

And then, through a law clerk last summer, I discovered “the Wayback Machine.” Located at archive.org, the “Wayback Machine” is “a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.” They started in 1996. Curious, I looked up my old football blog and was thrilled to discover all my posts were there! So I have purchased my domain names back and am working on relaunching the blog, which explains the basic rules of football for new watchers, puts out TV football schedules for the week in the NFL and the SEC at a minimum, and talks about the history of the game. Because I am no match for the WordPress of today, I bought a WordPress manual to start the football blog from scratch (except for the posts, which I will reuse). I am about a third of the way through the manual, which discusses a topic, then leaves you with a checklist to complete from the topics discussed in the chapter.

And therein lies the challenge. In the first chapter, I learned that wordpress.com was not the way to go, but rather wordpress.org. The book thinks it's cheaper. I spent an evening trying to load WordPress onto my computer. I’m still not sure I actually did so, but I finally was able to proceed to the exercises in Chapter 2 and complete them successfully. The book has yet to reach the editing/writing part of WordPress, something called “Gutenberg,” but I have hope we’ll get there eventually because I keep running across sentences like “This is where you’ll find X for Gutenberg, but don’t worry about that yet.”

What does this have to do with writing mysteries? Quite a lot, actually. Yesterday, Sunday, January 21, Sarah Burr published an excellent post, https://writerswhokill.blogspot.com/2024/01/prepping-for-press-in-new-year-by-sarah.html. In it, she offers advice on preparing a press kit for speaking engagements or interviews, which includes adding links in your press materials to your websites. A writer needs a “platform” website for their works to help promote their writing. While neither Working Mom nor The Football Novice will count as “platform” websites, working with them will help me create and publish my platform website when it is time, and give me a wealth of back material.

I’ll let you know once I’m able to write fresh posts for Working Mom. I’m not sure when I’ll make The Football Novice public: either right before the NFL Hall of Fame game in August, or right before the new spring league, the United Football League (created by the merger of the XFL and USFL), starts in March.

What adventures have you experienced in working on your on-line sites? Is there a “one size fits all” manual not restricted to a specific platform? I’d love to hear from some of you who have tackled this challenge successfully to know there’s light at the end of my tunnel.