Tag: blogging

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Yes, it is a competition, even with a fictitious blog

Tonight I was wrapping presents (no, I’m not done with my shopping) and catching up on my favorite drama, The Good Wife. It was about a trial gone wrong, and as the defending law firm was investigating the jury, they discovered that one of the members of the jury was a blogger. She updated her blog twice a day.

TWICE A DAY.

I’m lucky if Lemon Drop Pie is updated twice a week. Not only that, but the blog was about BUTTONS. Not the 125×125 pixel type of buttons that we bloggers like to adorn our blogs with. But real fastener-type buttons. What could she possibly write about buttons?

Yes, I know it is a fictitious blog. But I was still jealous of all the time this women spent blogging.

That’s not even the worst part. The worst part was not that she updated her blog twice a day, or that the judge said, “I hate the word ‘blog’.”

No, there was something even worse. This juror, the fictitious blogger who blogs about buttons, received 45,000 hits on one of her questionable blog posts about the trial. I haven’t received that many hits on my blog in three years!

I bet it was because she blogged twice a day. I’ll try to control my jealousy. Promise.

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That’s What Husbands Are For

Last Friday morning, my blog was starting to look exactly the way I wanted it to. By Friday evening, I had messed something up and nothing looked the same anymore. It all started when I pasted my Google Friends Connect code into a custom code box instead of a widget box. My theme went berserk, and I couldn’t recover from my mistake. The funny thing about that mistake is that in a few months, Google is ending GFC for WordPress blogs! And just after I reached 200 followers. Gah!

I sprawled on the couch crying, looking and acting like a petulant toddler demanding ice cream.

The disadvantage of having a lower freezer.

I cried that I wasn’t smart enough to do this; I contemplated going back to Blogger; I cursed my lack of research; I regretted making my new blog public before it was perfect. And yes, I do have a backup of my blog before my mistake, but what good is a backup when you don’t know how to restore it to WordPress?

All the while, Ed sat by me and consoled me. He told me his programming problems at work, he told me I would figure it out. We brainstormed solutions. Most of all, he sat and listened to me.

In the end, I decided to go back to the previous version of the theme I had purchased, to wait until I watched more tutorials and figured out a few more things. Most of all, I just wanted to write again. But first, I needed a break. I barely touched the computer all weekend. I read my book, made scrambled eggs for breakfast, and re-caulked my shower. I played Labyrinth with the girls and took them to a Bethlehem Walk.

Thinking about all that time I spent on my blog design, just to lose it all, I realized it wasn’t all wasted time. For two days, I had an invalid feed, but I figured out how to make it valid again. After installed two different comment plugins, and having both the plugin and default comment forms appear on my blog, I posted in my theme’s forum and they discovered that duplicate comment forms was a bug in the new theme. They’re working to resolve that problem. Even though Lemon Drop Pie doesn’t look the way I envisioned it, I have accomplished some things.

When I thanked Ed for listening to me whine about my blog, he said, “That’s what I’m here for.” He couldn’t solve my problems, but he did just what I needed him to do. Listen.