Gosh, Don’t I Feel Stupid Now?

In my very first post, I talked about how difficult I found Wordpress and that the steep learning curve turned me off blogging for almost a year. In that post, I talked about the apparent simplicity of Blogger. I was excited by the prospect of an intuitive, easy-to-use service which allowed me to focus on writing instead of wrestling with it to do what I want. Unfortunately, this excitement was short-lived. After posting my first blog entry, I discovered that the body text was very, very small. It was so small that I almost had to squint to read complete sentences. I knew that I needed to fix it, because who’s going to have the patience to read a blog that looks like it was formatted to be read by mice, rats and other small rodents?

I had downloaded a new template and I suspected it was set to display text ridiculously small. I searched online to find the correct line of code to edit in the raw HTML (something which I know a tiny, little bit about). This took a long time, because I couldn’t seem to find the right block of code to edit. I managed to edit everything else, but not the body text size. Next, I tried to change the text size in the Page Elements tab. This allowed me to change everything except the body text size. Finally, I tried to edit the post itself. The text had been copied from Textedit on my Mac and for some reason, the text pasted by default as small size. I quickly changed the text size and hallelujah! After an hour and a half of tinkering, my blog was finally readable.

In my first entry, I mentioned that I have no interest editing CSS and HTML. I don’t enjoy all that mucking around, I find it tedious and boring. However, I was determined to make my new template work. Now that I look at it, I realise that I started with the most difficult solution and worked backwards to the most simple. Isn’t that odd? The problem was, I expected the problem to be more complicated than it actually was. This simplicity thing is going to take some getting used to.

Squeaky Clean, 100% New Blog!

This will be my second attempt to maintain a blog. My first attempt was going excellently for a couple of weeks. I was inspired to write my quirky little observations of everyday life. However, I quickly became frustrated and gave up. As someone who has little patience for difficult technology and software, I lost interest when my blog service didn’t allow me to use a specific image. I could see the filename on the list of images, but I could NOT work out how to make it display on the blog.

I know this sounds mildly pathetic, but it was enough to turn me off blogging for almost a year. When I use a piece of software or crank up a computer, I just want it to WORK. Is that too much to ask? The significance of my frustration is the fact that I had been blogging with Wordpress.

Anyone who has been blogging for a while knows that there is an ongoing debate between lovers of Blogger and Wordpress fanatics. I Googled “Blogger vs Wordpress” and read through the most relevant results. Some of them compared such things as CSS editing and scripts. That’s fantastic for the techno-savvy, but I just want to know: which one is the easiest? Which one will allow me to write an entry, upload a photo and not HAVE to worry about inconsequential things like CSS editing and scripts?

A friend suggested Blogger because of its ease of use. He finds that Blogger is simple, while Wordpress is involved and unnecessarily complicated. I know there are enough Wordpress fanatics who will vehemently disagree with me. Go right ahead. One day, when I get a bit more interested in blogging, I may join you. But for now, I want to concentrate on writing blog entries, not wrestling the blog service to display one lousy picture.