First Thoughts - How not to Start a Blog!

I’ve been working on my blog for almost a month; it’s insanely complicated to get started and figure out how to even populate it!

So I thought my first contemplation ought to be about the process (so that you’ll forgive me if it isn’t perfect, at least initially)!

I had decided to start this in November when we first arrived; maybe I should have done the groundwork earlier while we were still in HK and I had a load of tech-savvy students, who would have got me up and running in 10 minutes, but I didn’t.

So November it all began with the purchase of a domain and WIX site. It probably took me a day to marry the two, but eventually everything clicked into place, and I found a nice template for the blog.

Next step, do a bit of writing. Interestingly getting started with that wasn’t as hard as I had thought because I had lots to say, but there was always the concern at the back of my mind that what is interesting to me might not be to anyone else. (so constructive feedback welcome, please – I’m learning as I go along).

That was the easy part. Images! Oh my goodness! I have so many images of Africa, I thought. What could be difficult about uploading them, I thought…

My all-time favourite image of a leopard looking at me was the obvious choice for the header image. I’d previously cropped and sharpened it to perfection (producing an amazing bookmark in the process), so I loaded it up and carried on adding images for each section, reasonably successfully. (I thought)

At that point all work stopped when we had to go to the UK.

On our return, back I came and started to try to populate the site. It took me over a week of video watching and trial and effort before I figured out you have to put all the posts into categories so that the buttons at the top will work. I’ve no idea if the smaller buttons work – I won’t find out until I publish the site!?! Unless you’ve done something like this, you cannot understand the counter-intuitiveness and the frustration. I was consciously having to stop myself grinding my teeth by the end of it. You know it’s got to be easy, and it is, once you know. But in the meantime it isn’t.

Anyway, eventually all came together and posts were finally linked to categories.

Almost there, and time to add images to the posts. Not too tricky, with just the occasional need to edit for fit. I want to use only my own images, but have cheated on the ‘Food’ section for now because I was too busy eating to take photos. I suspect from now on I’m going to become one of those sad people who photograph everything they do!

All complete, the moment came to click publish.

One final check that everything was okay and then…

Then I noticed that the gremlins who fitted my amazing leopard picture into the header had cut off its head!

Could I fix it? No. An hour later, I succumbed and reverted to the original image, un-sharpened and uncropped. After multiple attempts and tweaks, it finally got uploaded it to the site. I’ll no doubt go back and fix it (and the others) at some point, but for now, I just need to get this show on the road, otherwise I’ll have been here a year with nothing shared.

So with some trepidation, today, the blog goes live!