Thing 1: Setting Up and Registering My Blog

Getting started with 23 Things @ NEFLIN by setting up and registering my blog was a little bit traumatic in that it took much longer and did not go as smoothly as I had expected.

Despite good intentions to dive in on Day 1 (Monday, 1/12), I could not find a moment to even log into the NEFLINs23Things blog until Friday (1/16).

Even then, the two-hour lunch break during which I had planned to accomplish Thing 1 evaporated in the face of multiple interruptions and contingencies requiring my urgent attention.  Alas.

I left work at 6:30 p.m. having barely managed to read through the instructions!

Undaunted, I raced home and bolted dinner while conscientiously rereading the directions.  My first pass had been so fragmentary, I was afraid maybe I'd missed something important.  Luckily, I hadn't, but this took a while to establish--and I was champing at the bit! 

After logging onto Blogger, establishing a Google account went fine.  I also enjoyed the Common Craft Show video on what a blog is.  I found it concise, informative, and charmingly low tech.

So far so good.  Things seemed to be getting back on track.

Then I encountered difficulty with the blog creation process.  Augh!

Thinking up an interesting, original name was time-consuming.  (The first several I tried were taken.  Rats!)  My family were interested in what I was doing and kept up a constant barrage of questions and suggestions which were alternately helpful and distracting.

At a couple of points during the process, I found I needed to back up and correct an earlier entry.  This seemed at first to be going okay.  I was allowed to proceed forward again after typing in a new squiggly word.

However, at one point, the system just seemed to seize up.  It wouldn't let me go any further forward, insisting that the name I'd finally chosen (after dutifully checking availability) was unusable.  It was about 9:30 p.m.  I was tired, frustrated, and fried.

"I'm starting over," I announced brokenly.

"We're going to bed," my family said, their electric toothbrushes buzzing.

"Fine.  Be that way," I muttered, closing my window and logging back into Blogger in despair, expecting to have to do it all over from scratch.

But I didn't have to!

By some miracle, my blog existed, named the name I had chosen.  My display name was wrong--the last change I'd made hadn't taken--but by stumbling around through the Profile settings, I was able to correct it.

I'd been assigned some sort of default template, having never made it that far in the process, but I was able to select a new one easily in Layout.

That done, I quit while I was ahead.  It was 10 p.m.  I was a basket case.  But I had a blog.

The rest is all denouement.  I logged back in the following day.  Tinkered a little with profile and settings, uploaded a picture.  (Fetching likeness, no?)  Then I registered and started posting.

So here I am.  It's done.  As with childbirth, you forget the bad parts.  It was worth it.  I'm looking forward to Thing 2.