I shall let you in on a secret. I’m old enough to remember a time before laptops and desk top computers.
As I bashed out news stories on an ancient manual Remington, cursing the keys that kept jamming, I looked longingly at adverts for electric typewriters. But the newspaper company I worked for was stuck in the dark ages. I changed to a company I’d heard equipped their journalists with portable computers. No more rushing out of the court room to try and find a public phone that worked so I could dictate the story before deadline. Paradise would soon be mine I thought. Hmm. The machine was portable strictly speaking but still took muscles the size of Popeye’s to lug around in its metal carrying case. And then to use it to file stories you had to couple some rubber caps over the speaker of the phone. But the caps were round and my phone at home had oblong speakers. So no hope of rolling out of bed late and still making the deadline.
I changed careers and this time got a desk top computer. It was progress of a sort but it was DOS based so not wonderful. We bought an Amstrad at home and – after much frustration – got it to connect to something called the Internet. What a revelation. When my husband needed my help to write colour pieces on “preparing for your wedding’ I could with a few clicks discover wedding traditions in other countries with which to regail readers.
Life – and technology – moved on. Today I can sit in my garden typing this post while connected seamlessly to the Internet. My iPad tells me when I’ve read more pages of a book on the Kindle than I have on the iPad and do I want it to synchronise for me. At work with a few clicks I can share my computer screen so I can collaborate real time on documents and presentations with colleagues in other parts of the world. I can even do teleconferences via the computer from home and no-one will ever know I’m still in my PJs…..
And yet….
You knew there was a but coming didn’t you???
Though I consider myself to be technology savvy I have yet to conquer some of the whistles and bells capabilities of the WordPress platform I use to create this blog. I managed after a fashion to grasp the basics (and I do mean basic) of HTML. But I absolutely cannot get some of the widgets to work.
Three times this week I tried to create a poll. I see it on the draft version of the post. But when I go to preview, all I see is a string of code.
I can’t get the icons for my social media accounts to increase in size either. If you look on the right menu on my home page, you’ll see how minuscule they are.
Nor can I get the tagline of the site to appear lower down the header image so it is more readable.
Is it me or is it really this difficult???
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