On Giants' Shoulders

Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Struggling with HTML

Being nothing like a techie, I've been sitting on my daughter's shoulders a lot this week as I try to put stuff on my blog. Posts I can do, but links are a challenge. If anyone logged in this morning they would have found very strange stuff on the links list as I struggled to make html work for me. I ranted at the mouse, copied, pasted, saved, published, viewed, shrieked with dismay and went back and tried again. The one thing I did not do was wake up Sleeping Beauty, otherwise known as the HTML Sleuth, to help me. I finally achieved some degree of success and I'm as proud of myself as a newly walking toddler.

Learning a new thing is good for us, at any age. I'm fairly certain I'll never achieve my daughter's level of competency (after all she did take a college course in this stuff) but if I can toddle around I'll be satisfied, I think... I just wish I could do this in straightforward English as in "Computer take the url from Bonny Glen and put it at the bottom of my links list." Instead I have to struggle with < and> and / and commands I don't understand. Whine, whine, whine! It reminds me of math in public school, "why can't they make this so normal people (as in verbally gifted, mathematically challenged) can understand it?" What I have to accept is that for the computer, just as for my math instructor this is straightforward, and the fact that I don't find it that way is not the computer's fault. I did figure out in grad school that the fact that I didn't understand math better, however, was in part my instructor's fault because a better instructor made me a much better math student.

So for all of you out there struggling with a new thing, keep plugging away at it. You may never become a mathematician, or a computer expert, but minimal competency is within your grasp. Toddle on!

1 Comments:

At 3:54 PM, Blogger Karen Edmisten said...

I was inordinately proud of myself when I figured out how to change the colors on my blog. :-) I'm toddling through ....

 

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