Week 2 of Learning 2.0 aka: The joys of blogging

I kept a blog for quite a few years and thoroughly enjoyed it, the writing, the contacts with folks from far away, the insights into other people's lives, their photos, their thoughts.

My blog still exists but cannot be accessed from work because Brimbank Libraries are protected by MailMarshall and MailMarshall does not approve of LiveJournal. Possibly something to do with all that fanfic which wanders off into the land of soft porn at times methinks. Also I suspect the title of the LJ blog Vintage Sex is, on its lonesome, enough to render LJ Land forever inappropriate viewing for a public library and certainly a den of iniquity from the perspective of employees expanding their understanding of new technologies on the company clock.

So I thought it might be interesting to start the process again over here @ blogspot. By comparison this is a much more user friendly interface. LJ involves downloading a client (semagic) and installing it. I did this years ago and can remember that the downloading was tedious because it is done via mirror sites and once a geographically challenged person - such as myself - managed to locate the right site and language then start the download (we're on dial up, us country folks from the back blocks of rural Victoria: think no street lights, no footpaths and yes, the dreaded septic tank and you'll have the picture) wander off have a cup of coffee, wander back and watch the bar slowly march across the 'time remaining' box, collect the mail (five minute walk to the mailbox and five back), have another coffee and oh, 'tis done. Download finished! What next? Install the programme, easy enough if you can find it. In my computer innocence it hadn't occured to me to make a note of the name of the client so another trawl through the instructions at LJ was mandated. At which point I gave up and made a plunger full of coffee to last the distance.

Getting started at LJ took me two days, this has taken forty five minutes including the typing and the reading of instructions and the swapping through three machines in the hope of finding one where the headphones work.

Even allowing for the exponenetial growth rate in computer literacy that being part of an online community will bring to you, Blogger is winning on points.

So far.

(Heh.)