We Don't Have to Wash Out of Cyberspace

When I first viewed a line of “html” a while back, I blinked, froze, and asked my tech trainer to handle it. I’d hired him to design my website, a portfolio of my artwork. That’s why he’s here, right? Creating my artworks kept me busy enough, right?

But blinking, freezing, and passing it on keeps threatening to wash me out of cyberspace. Techniques to combat these behaviors: Breathe deeply until very still inside. Understand exactly why I need all this kind of stuff: to get out of my back yard. Blow off embarrassment about not getting it immediately. After the last session with my tech trainer, I gave myself a homework assignment to create links on this blog.

I’ll stop a second here to tell you that I’d been reading Elizabeth Castro’s book “Publishing a Blog with Blogger”, which I’d ordered through Amazon.com. I examined each feature of Blogger, opened and closed them again and again over and over, until they became as familiar to me as my stove or my car. Best of all I overcame the fear that I’d break something accidentally, let’s say, erased a link or two that my trainer had created.

From the Template feature, Edit Current, I copied one of my trainer’s lines for a link, pasted it onto a Word document. You might wonder why I included the Word document in this procedure. Well, on the Word document, I could scrutinize the line, making sure every word and symbol were correct before moving on to Blogger’s Template, Edit Current.

On the Word document, I erased the address and title in that line and replaced them with the address and title of the new link that I wanted to create. Then I copied the revised line into the Template, Edit Current. Instructions for saving and republishing are clear. So far, so good.

The title of the link appeared on my blog. Fine. But when I clicked on the link, I got an error sign. When a hidden ding compels you to throw your computer against the wall, repeat the above exercises. When my trainer showed up, we got to work on this ding immediately. Almost by accident, he’d found out earlier that you couldn’t paste an “html” line copied from Word onto Template, Edit Current. Using TextWrangler, we could.

By the time of this post, I had hoped to find out what if any business insurance policy you would need for an advertising blog. I have found out nothing. If you find your way here and have any information about this subject, I would deeply appreciate your input.

Next leg: I’ll read Elizabeth Castro’s book, “HTML for The World Wide Web.” Castro’s books are excellent training manuals. In "Publishing a Blog with Blogger," large full color illustrations, with clear labeling, draw you in and keep you reading and puttering page after page.