Getting Creative: Technical Difficulties

(Continued from Getting Creative: Half-Baked Blog)

Featured Photo: “Kinkaku-ji (Golden Pavilion)” Kyoto, Japan—2009

As in my previous post, the Featured Photo, “Kinkaku-ji (Golden Pavilion)” has nothing to do with today’s post, I simply decided to choose one of my all-time favorite pictures. As with other favorite photos, which I have used for wallpaper on other electronic devices, the Golden Pavilion has served for many years as the Home Screen background on my Apple MacBook computer. As for the story, you’ll simply have to wait; I plan to write a detailed series of posts describing my wonderful trip to Kyoto, Japan in 2009. For now, I want to continue with the introduction to my blog.

A Google search revealed that Justin Hall created the first blog ever, as a place to publish his writing, while he was a student at Swarthmore College—just 25 miles from where I now live. The year was 1994. That was about 25 years after I got my first camera; it was also about 25 years before my brother and I would have “the conversation” that would lead to my own blog site. By the time I finally launched my own blog, it was almost 30 years after Justin Hall’s first blog, and more than 50 years after my first camera. I thought it was appropriate to give a nod to Justin because I needed to have a blog—in addition to my photos—to pursue my creative outlet.

Let me get back to explaining the delay in launching my blog. After the Temple University class ended, and I started writing again, I realized there was another component to starting a blog: the practical and technical details associated with the website itself. Shortly after I came back from BroGo 2020 in Montreat, energized to start my blog, I had purchased the domain name for the website: a-picture-and-a-thousand-words.com; I had to add the dashes because the website without dashes: apictureandathousandwords.com, was already taken. Looking at it now, I like it better with the dashes. But for the first two years, all I did with my website was pay the annual cost of owning the domain.

When I thought I had a sufficient number of posts in progress—so the blog might actually get off the ground—I reached out to my brother to get some nuts-and-bolts practical advice about technical details for blogging, based on his own experience. Looking back to 1994, I’m sure Justin Hall faced monumental challenges when he created the very first blog, since there were no examples to learn from. The situation today is different than 1994, with countless blogsites available to provide inspiration and guidance to new bloggers. Still, it seems a lot has changed since my brother started his blog 10 years ago—it seems more complicated now. I had to make several decisions and faced many difficulties as I tried to set up my blogsite. These days, even being creative requires some amount of technology know-how.

After talking with my brother, and considering the options, I followed his example and went with WordPress as my “web content management system.” But I also needed to understand the differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. Based on internet suggestions—and unlike my brother—I ended up choosing .org, which meant I would be “self-hosting.” That meant I had to choose a “web hosting site.” Based on more internet searching and on-line recommendations, I decided to go with Bluehost, but that required me to move the domain I had previously purchased from Domain.com to Bluehost.com, although I may have simply misunderstood whether that was necessary. As part of that domain transfer, I had to make sure my ns1 and ns2—the “name servers”—pointed to Bluehost.com. I also needed to know what my IP address was, and I had to wait a few days for my website IP to proliferate across the web-server blogosphere around the world, before I could actually see my website on the internet. Throughout this ordeal, I made several calls and talked for about 2-1/2 hours with technical reps at Bluehost. They were very patient and helpful, but I was trying to resolve questions concerning things I didn’t begin to understand.

Eventually, the technical details got worked out—mostly. I still had to choose a theme for my website—essentially the user-interface—to create the look and feel of the blogsite. There were thousands of themes to choose from, but I found one that seemed well-suited to photography and storytelling. Then, I made additional decisions about the appearance of my website, based on the available options in my chosen theme. I like my blog’s appearance, except when I don’t; it sometimes suffers from another technical problem, which I have not yet resolved. The blogsite is supposed to look like this:

But sometimes, it looks like this:

The links to individual posts appear as purple and blue text on a gray background; the blogsite menu is nearly indecipherable, with the colored text on a black background. I hope you’ve not experienced this with my site—there was at least one reader who did—but I can assure you the links still work. If you can read the words to know where you want to go, clicking on the link will take you to the selected post or menu information. And fortunately, if you return to the site in an hour or a day, it seems things get cleared up and the site appears normal. As far as I’ve been able to determine, this issue has something to do with “deleting the cache” on my computer or server, and “regenerating the critical CSS.” I don’t even know what CSS stands for. Sigh…

I believe it was sometime in June 2023 when the blogsite was finally online (although not yet “live” for visitors to see) and I had finished several of the “introductory posts” to launch my blog, with appropriate photos selected from my extensive portfolio. In the last stages of getting ready to “officially” start my blog—and despite the technical difficulties I encountered—I realized I had learned three important lessons along the way:

1. I would not have started a blog without having the photos as the original inspiration and colorful source material.

2. I would not have started to curate and share my photos without having the blog as a platform for me to tell the stories that went along with the pictures.

3. And perhaps most importantly, I realized that the blog would not be a waste of time; it would be fun to write the stories and share my photos…even if no one read the blog!

Oh, and there was one more thing I realized: unlike what I had done throughout my career and early retirement, I would not be doing scientific or journalistic writing. For the individual posts on my blog, I had the freedom to write whatever I wanted, however I wanted, to tell the story, about my life, my travels, and my photos.

Two and a half years after BroGo 2020 in Montreat, I was ready to share my blog with the world. It was no accident that my very first post was on July 2, 2023. Even though my deadline to launch was completely arbitrary and long overdue, since the initial inspiration to start the blog was in the distant past, my launch date was significant to me: exactly five years since the first workday when I did not go to back to work and went kayaking instead: five years since my retirement, detailed in an earlier post.

I had long before decided I would begin my blog with an introductory series of posts to describe my journey to blogging; I wanted to introduce myself, tell how I got here, and say what the blog would be about. Initially, I imagined there would be three posts in this series, with the following titles:

1. Introduction: How It All Started

2. And Then There Were the Middle Years

3. Which Brings Me to Today

The first post turned out fairly close to my original idea: my first camera and memories of my early black-and-white photo of the pink lamp with flowers. But when I started writing the second and third posts, things got a bit out of hand; I realized I had more to say than I previously imagined. I just kept writing and writing, expanding the story as I went along; it truly felt like I was falling down a series of rabbit-holes, as I described in another post. I was really enjoying both the craft and the art of writing.

If you haven’t been counting, this is now the twelfth post in my introductory series and—believe it or not—this won’t be the last; I think I have one more introductory post and perhaps an epilogue, which I plan to bring you in the coming weeks. And then I’ll surely be ready to start my real blogging.

As the number of posts have grown from the three I initially envisioned, I have come to realize I had a specific purpose in mind for the final entry in my introductory series: a post with the (now updated) title, “Introduction Reboot: What’s It All About?” That’s the post I plan to bring you next week: finally, some practical information about what my blog is supposed to be!

And now, a warning for those out there with little time or patience: although it’s still a work-in-progress, my post next week will be the longest yet, approaching somewhere around 2,500 words, give or take a few! I apologize in advance for the length, but I realize I have to wrap up this “introductory series” eventually, and I think next week’s post will tie things up pretty well.

You might, perhaps, view it as a bonus—a double-header of a post—or you might be tempted to just skip it. But if you’ll allow me, I suggest you pour a large mug of hot coffee, curl up in a comfortable chair, and start reading. If you’re still with me now—after all the meanderings about my early life, my love of photography, my work, and my family in prior posts—I believe you’ll find the next entry worthwhile, because there will be more of the same. Hope to see you next week.

(To be continued…)