I’m going to go ahead and confess something that most of you probably already know. I am not a technological genius. In fact, I try to avoid dealing with technology as much as possible because I can’t be trusted with it.
I mean, just in the last six weeks I’ve managed to accidentally delete all my iTunes songs and everything else off my desktop. And I’ve never been so thankful for the people at the Apple store who took pity on me and made it all magically appear. I may have wept.
Basically my preferred method of dealing with computer issues is to close it and then open it again. And if that doesn’t work then I’ll bang it on something and see if that helps.
That’s pretty much all I’ve got. If neither of those things works then you’ll know because there won’t be anything new on the blog until I get to the Apple store.
It’s really a wonder that I ever started a blog. And when I made the switch to WordPress a few years ago, I quickly realized I was in over my head. Like Paris Hilton at a MENSA meeting.
Oh sure. I had big ambitions at first. I talked a good game about wanting to learn how to “code” things and make graphics and figure out how to change my design every month, but that quickly devolved into a simpler dream of just not causing the whole thing to explode because I don’t know what I’m doing.
So I found Cathy who owns a business called Desperately Seeking WordPress, which is, appropriately enough, a business that deals in WordPress sites. This isn’t an advertisement for Cathy, but I feel like she should get a shout out for all the misery and pain I’ve caused her over the years. God bless her.
And so Cathy works behind the scenes to keep everything running smoothly while I just get on and type a few words every evening like a trained monkey. But occasionally I’ll see something I like on another blog and I’ll email Cathy with something like “Hey! Could I get one of those whatchmacallit things at the bottom of the thing on the right side of my main page?”
Then she’ll email me back and somehow know exactly what I’m talking about and then she’ll do it. It’s like magic. Or maybe it’s more like idiot interpretation. I don’t know.
And that’s what happened last week. Cathy was fixing up a few things on the blog because she knows I have no idea what I’m doing and she sent me an email and suggested that I might want to include a thing at the bottom of each post that would allow people to subscribe by email.
(That’s a fancy way of saying that you’ll get an email notification in your inbox every time I write a new post.)
(You probably already know that, but I had no idea.)
(It’s a wonder that I’m not sitting in a room somewhere with a legal pad and a pen just writing out stories in longhand to share with Gulley.)
So I told her that would be great. Sure! Let’s do that! Let’s join in and do something that other bloggers have been doing since 2001. I love being ten to eleven years behind technology. Maybe next week I’ll go wild and get an answering machine and see about this new thing called “Call-waiting”.
Cathy emailed me back and said she’d need the username and password of my Google account to access my feed settings. I sent her back the username and password.
Then she sent me another email that said those didn’t work because I’d never switched my feeds over from Feedburner after it changed to Google, but that would mean it had been three or four years since I’d logged into my Feedburner account and how was that possible?
(What? Is this email in English?)
I sent her back an email that probably made her want to mail me a legal pad and a pen with a request that I please get off the internet forever. I asked, “Are you sure I have a Feedburner account?”
As it turns out I have a Feedburner account. I’ve had one for six years. That’s why you internet savvy folks are able to subscribe to my posts on Google Reader or Bloglines or whatever else is out there that I have no idea exists. The problem is that I had no recollection of ever creating the aforementioned account.
Yet we needed to access that account to enable email subscriptions to the blog. And I could just create a new account but then all of you who have subscribed to the old account wouldn’t know if anything ever changed.
(Is this making your head hurt? My head hurts.)
So I’ve spent the last week trying every username and password combination I have ever used in my whole life trying to crack the code that I created when I opened that stupid Feedburner account six years ago. I felt like I was that Department of Defense computer in War Games. And I almost gave up. After six days of various combinations of my name and birthdate and Caroline’s name and birthdate and my childhood pet’s name, I was out of guesses.
But then it hit me like a bolt of lightning on Sunday night. I wish I could say I sat upright in bed and yelled “EUREKA!” but that would be a lie. However, I traveled back to my brain six years ago and remembered that I used to really like to use the number 1 after almost everything.
Lo and behold, it worked.
And so I emailed Cathy with the good news. She was able to fix all my feeds and now WE ARE VERY FANCY and you can enter your email in that little box under SUBSCRIBE at the bottom of this post and get all new posts sent to your email address. What? Is this 2002? What is this Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome?
It’s not easy being on the cutting edge.
Cathy also suggested that I subscribe to a service called Last Pass that’s a free service that manages your online passwords securely so you never have to worry about losing them.
I’m not sure why she thinks I need that.
I’ll just write them all down on my legal pad.