rocksandy.rocks

When I read this assignment I thought “Great!” I finally get to spend some time leisurely flitting around random WordPress blogs and The Blogging 101 Commons. Silly, silly girl. This has been a highly frustrating exercise for me. I think I’ve learned that I simply don’t have the hang of “tags” quite yet. And my restlessness, which I suspect some people would claim is ADD these days, appeared to have kicked in as apparently I wasn’t able to follow the directions very well. I’ll take the blame.

I’ll also mention that I’m frustrated because Blogging 101 may make me fat. I haven’t been to the gym since Sunday. I skipped it today, excited to come home and work on Day Three, telling myself that I’d do an exercise DVD (I initially typed “video” – showing both my age and my technological ineptness) at some point in the evening. That didn’t happen.

So although I have failed to follow today’s assignment instructions completely, I did get a good lesson on the [stupid ;o)] Reader. For this assignment I was supposed to:

Add five topics (aka “tags”), so you can access them quickly whenever you feel like doing some reading. As you browse the topics, follow five new blogs, too.

I ended up skipping the tags part because when I searched under things like “heavy metal” and “classic rock” and “new professor” and “psychology” I didn’t find anything I want to clutter up my Reader with. I am a blogger that can’t read too many blogs due to a lack of time to do so. I had a horrible time at some people’s blogs finding an “about” page (note to self: keep site organized for others to easily maneuver). I read a lot of random posts. In the end I found four blogs to add to my Reader: Hard Rock Daddy, Distorted Sound Magazine, Forgotten Rock Classics, and Mackenzie Sharp. These blogs are mainly some form of concert or band review – so I look forward to reading more from them. I would add their URL to this blog but I’m running out of technological steam over here.

Then I sat there wondering how I could add the only two blogs that I actually do read on a semi-regular basis, one via email (Lefsetz Letter) and one via website (Eddie Trunk). I had no idea how to add these guys as I did not see a “Follow” link on their website, so I went to The Commons intending to ask….and, thanks be to the WordPress Happiness Engineers, right there in front of my face was a box telling me how to follow any blog, whether it was in WordPress or not! Yay! The directions did not work that smoothly, as I never saw the “edit” button I was supposed to push, but I clicked around and about and managed to add both of these to my Reader. I might be able to do it again, but it’s iffy.

Several hours later, happy that I did part of the assignment – it really bugs me when I don’t follow directions explicitly – I decided to take on the last task of organizing these Reader blogs into Reader Lists. Sigh. Since I couldn’t figure out how to find the URL to each blog I followed without going to each one individually and grabbing it, I decided to just put Lefsetz and Trunk into a list I named “Regulars.” It took the Trunk URL just fine, but it told me the Lefsetz URL didn’t exist or something like that, even though I am following it in my Reader. At that point I figured I’d had enough Reader lesson.

I promise I won’t complain in my blog all that often – but there you have it…my experiences with Day Three. I really didn’t expect this program to be all unicorns and rainbows, so it’s all good.