Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Danger, Hard Hat Zone

Warning, major construction going on!

Please don your hard hats before entering and watch your step. I'm so excited to welcome you to the grand opening of my new blog.

I love to learn and have lots of interests...science, nature, art, music, history, philosophy, poetry, books, gardening, food, living more simply, and lots more. I love to write (essays, stories, and poetry), paint, make jewelry, and take photos.

That means I'll be writing on a wide variety of topics and sharing some of my poems and other creative projects. I hope you will enjoy and come back often. Please feel free to leave comments...I love feedback and getting to know you.



Getting Started


It has certainly been an interesting experience launching this blog. There are so many steps...I really had no idea! There have been times when I wondered if I would ever get to the point of actually writing.

Just deciding on a name put things on hold for several days. I had lots of ideas but it's more complicated than it looks. The name needs to be notable but at the same time it needs to be easy to remember. It also needs to be easy to spell. I tried lots of names but so many were already taken or there was a blog with a similar name.There are thousands and thousands of blogs out there! I finally decided on 'Rain Music and Mindstorms'. I'm a little worried that it might be too long...all those letters to type.

Once you get past the hurdle of a name then you have to decide on a template. Ha, that was fun...looking through thousands of templates. Okay, okay, that was probably a slight exaggeration but there were certainly a lot of them. Being an artist and something of a perfectionist, I wanted something special. Something elegant and balanced that would be pleasing on its own but wouldn't detract from any photos or artwork I might post.

I finally found something very simple but pretty (not on Blogger) and downloaded it. Yikes, the design was simple but the steps to get it onto this site and functional were overwhelming! Although I'm fairly computer literate, I'm a novice when it comes to what was required to put that template on this site. I thought templates were supposed to make it easy. Naive, huh?

I'm sure I could have done it eventually but frankly I just didn't want to invest the time in learning a skill that I wouldn't be likely to use again. (That's my story and I'm sticking to it!). So I opted for one of the templates available right here. I chose a simple one called Minima and started playing with it.

It wasn't exactly what I was looking for but I thought with a few tweaks it would be a nice start. For starters, I didn't like being stuck with one color background on the whole blog. I wanted to change the header box color and the blog post area color. I didn't know if it was possible or how to do it but I wanted to try.

I may be a novice in setting up a blog but I'm a world class Googler! I found some information and was able to make some small changes. There are lots more things I want to add or change but this will get me started. I am NOT a computer geek, although I do think it would be kind of fun to be one. Give me time a little more time and a few more adventures...who knows what will happen.

Meanwhile, I'm so excited to finally get started! I hope you will join me on my adventure. Next post I promise not to spend the whole time talking about the start up process.

No comments:

Post a Comment