I had a hard time thinking about what I would write for this Carnival, everything I thought of was obvious. Getting to know people from around the world and across America, having a place to vent, being able to give my opinion in a public forum, and being able to work on my writing skills, was something that everyone probably could say. Why bother writing about it? And I’ve already blogged about wanting to share what I learned in seminary, so why bore everyone with repeating myself.
But then it hit me, why not write about the aspect of blogging that has been a surprising source of enjoyment: the technical end of blogging. On the one hand this shouldn’t have been a surprise, I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science and I’ve spent many years working with mark up languages. But on the other hand this surprised me because I thought it was a closed door in my life, one that I thought I had firmly shut after I decided to be a full time stay-at-home and focus on studying the Bible.
But something happened when I entered the blogging environment and I found that I wasn’t happy with the Blogger templates, everyone had the same one and I didn’t like clicking on a link and seeing a blog that looked just like my blog but wasn’t. It was disconcerting. So, I started to tweak things here and there and I found that I really liked it. I liked changing the design of my blogs.
Then I found free templates on the Internet here, here and here (and I just found another one here). And I changed the templates for three of my blogs and I found each time I did it, I was faster and did a better job modifying the templates to meet my needs.
I also have enjoyed (you will be surprised by this I’m sure) trouble-shooting problems with the installation of the Blogging Chicks blogroll. It is fascinating (to me 🙂 why the script will work on one template but won’t work on the same exact template on another blog. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle that takes analyzing. You try this and that and you finally figure out why it didn’t work.
And I have enjoyed making my blog more functional by adding pieces missing from Blogger such as categories. I was able to create categories using del.icio.us tags to create the cloud in my side bar. I have found this to be very helpful when I’m trying to locate an article. Del.icio.us has made the process very easy to do and I plan to write a post on how to do it.
Which leads me to the final reason I love the technical side of blogging, so many people have no idea what they are doing when it comes to the technical side of blogging and it makes me happy that I’m in a position to help. To give them the information so that they can create a hyperlink or add a graphic to a post or side bar or to help them install their blogroll code. Or help them find a new template so that their blog will load faster. That part has been very rewarding, especially when I go to their blog and see the fruit of our effort.