NeanderthalSal

December 2015

This blog has been fermenting for over a year waiting for my Neanderthal Woman alter-ego to finish procrastinating. Poor old NeanderthalSal ably manages old-fashioned matters such as real life human contact (and even letter writing),  but whenever she's asked to lumber out of her comfort zone and into tech-territory she waves her club about in a discomfited frenzy. A soothing force will clearly be required!  My Grandfather’s cure-all would have been “a nice cuppa” (tea!), but I find a large glass of red wine works just as well …. sometimes even better!!! Tea-totallers please don't panic; I'll get the kettle on right away.

Aahhh, nectar! ...... I feel up to tackling this now :)

Back in September 2015 I finally took the bull by the horns and stayed noisily (due to my constant emanation of loud explicatives) glued to my computer for 10 solid days, (and almost as many nights) while I went  crazy  "creating my blog" on Wordpress. It was phenomenally difficult for a self-confessed Neanderthal Woman such as me to attempt navigating wordpress, but as I was ignorant of there being any other way to set up a blog, I reassured myself that if all the other bloggers I enjoy following had managed it, then so could I.

How could I have been so naive?

I soldiered on, unaided. True, there are loads of (un)helpful tutorials to refer to, but they were useless to me - I didn't speak their language, did I? To me, "plug-in" is a phrasal verb, and gadget is an electrical appliance which is handy during the preparation of meals. Then there's widget!!! "What the feck is a Widget, for heaven's sake? Well, I suppose it must be a very small widgeon, but what's that got to do with me setting up a blog??"  Maybe I'd made a mistake and Wordpress was really a site dedicated to the preparation of Game Pie: "Plug in your gadget and use it to pluck your grouse, widgets and pheasant".

Do you see where I'm going with this?

It's testament to my dogged determination to make it work that I managed to get any posts out at all on my Wordpress blog, before I realised I was barking up the wrong tree. And we're not talking a benign little bonsai here. This was a great big, benighted Monkey Puzzle Tree. The penny finally dropped when I sought professional help to tweak areas of my blog which continued to remain utterly beyond my abilities. It was soon clear that even the computer expert I had applied too couldn't handle WP either, but for his €50 fee he did kindly point out that most of the blogs I enjoy reading (they're listed on the "Blogs I Follow" page above) were using Blogger. Halle -blooming-lujah! I was saved.

I signed up with Blogger straight away, and though I won't pretend it's been perfectly plain sailing (let's not forget I'm still of the Neanderthal persuasion), the experience has been far more pleasurable. But, there was no way I was going to bin all of the hard work I'd put into getting out the first posts I'd actually managed to publish on WP. So I've decided to begin this Blog by republishing them.

THE MORAL OF THE STORY IS:-

If you're contemplating setting up a blog, :-

Avoid Wordpress like the plague if you value your sanity (unless of course you are VERY familiar with all things plug-widget-in-gadget)

Dive straight into  www.blogger.com and have a bit of fun!