Blogging for Dummies

I finally started reading 'Blogging for Dummies' yesterday. It is full of great ideas and I discoverd a whole chapter about RSS feeds. Not that I read the chapter, mind, but I know it's there! I did read the chapter called 'Ten Cool Tricks for Making your Blog Shine' and soon felt pretty overwhelmed and inadequate - again! Twittering, Mapping, Tag Clouds, Big Footers, Digging. It conjures up images of a fantasy novel, rather than anything I will ever be able to get my head around and actually use!

In the afternoon I spent some time trying to wrestle my photos into submission. At the moment I have them all in My Pictures on the PC. Although this doesn't take up as much room, in reality it is little different from a few shoe boxes of muddled photos. I thought getting techy and downloading Picasa might help. This has had the equivalent effect of ordering re-prints of all my photos and dumping them in boxes too! I think it is a glitch on my nearing-retirement PC or technophobia on my part but I can't actually get Picasa to do anything. So I tried Photobox. After discovering that it would take 13 hours to upload my photos but that I could do it 'quickly and easily' from Picasa, if only I could get Picasa to work, I just uploaded one 'box worth'. This seemed successful. But when I got overambitious and tried to make a photobook, my internet server gave up the ghost and shut down! I really don't know if it was a server problem or that, as my husband keeps telling me, my PC is old. (It is much younger than my youngest child, but perhaps I should be thinking in terms of hamsters rather than cats!)

I know that all this technology is wonderful and I love the world of blogs and e-mails but I do struggle to keep it in its place as slave rather than slave-driver. I fantasize about being this lady - I cannot imagine her stressed because her letter-writing table had 'crashed' or she had 3o letters in her 'inbox' after a weekend away!