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.
