Embrace The Change

For those of us of a certain age, change isn't easy. We weren't introduced to computers, or much at all by the way of technology, in the classroom. What we can do with a computer sometimes has passed us by in ways that those who are much younger can't understand. We just try different things to see what works, but we really don't have any idea why it does work or why it doesn't. And there are times when we are faced with the latter rather than the former.

Right now, some of us have had to move from our original blogsite to somewhere else. Our original site was very user friendly. One had to be a member in order to comment on our blogs, and we had to see the site owners advertising. We could only add to our pages things like a list of other websites we enjoyed and the list of the blogs we liked that were members of the site, but it was user friendly.

In order to customize a background we had to hunt the web, download the pic or background we wanted to use, and then upload it somewhere that would give it a code. Once that was done we had to open a feature called palette and then make changes in the html codes in order to change whatever we wanted to change. If you weren't sure what you were toying with, because you don't write code or understand it, well...lets just say things could get interesting.

There was a sense of community there. Like any community there were troublemakers. The site had a home page on which there were listed the "Most Popular Blogs" and at one time there was another place on that page where blogs the owner thought were worthy were listed. It was done by rotation, two or three at a time so you'd see something different each time you logged onto the home page. Problems arose when some of the bloggers didn't see their blogs prominently listed. Didn't mean they weren't there, just that they hadn't gotten lucky. The hue and cry raised by those bloggers with their noses out of joint spelled the end of that particular feature. Unfortunately, "Most Popular" remained. It was a thorn in the side of far too many people and the cause of a number of schoolyard fights. Fights which caused many bloggers we enjoyed to leave. I even left once and started the blog you're reading now. I didn't do much with it because it didn't have that sense of community nor the ease of use my old blog had.

The site never made the owner any money, so things couldn't be upgraded when necessary. It became one of the slowest sites online. Some of us donated money for a new server. Once the new server was purchased, other things started to go bad, and page loads became slower and slower. The site went down a couple of times for a number of hours each time. Finally we received notice that the site was closing as of April 31 this year. It was a sad day for many of us since we hadn't acquired knowledge of any other site. Our former site was so easy to use that we never had a need to do so. Well, now we do.

That's our bottom line right there. We have to make a change. We can do it in one of two ways. Either we stop blogging entirely or we learn to use another blog site without the easy software we're used to. We can look at it as a new adventure, try various places to see what works best for us, or we can sit here and whine about what we believe we've lost.

Nothing is ever perfect in this world nor online. Everything has it's pluses and it's minuses. The best thing we can do for ourselves is look at where we've been in the past with honesty. That too had it's ups and downs. The problem is that we're remembering the positives and failing to remind ourselves of the negatives. They existed. Our old site wasn't any more perfect than anything else is. All that "used to was" attitude does is bog us down. It adds to our frustration when we are faced with something new. Makes it harder for us to make heads or tails of what we're reading, and read we must since this place and others like it are different. Very different, but once we get the hang of it, we'll be all right.