It’s Alive! Kind of…

Write a blog, she said. It will be fun, she said. It will give you a creative outlet, she said. Well, my friend, Glenda, was right — it is fun, and I like being creative… . But she failed to mention that these blogs don’t just magically set themselves up ready to go, unless you hire someone. And part of being a Ranch Wife Ninja includes being thrifty and innovative, so paying someone was out of the question, especially if I didn’t want to get the rancher husband lecture which goes something like this, “I could have bought a new post hole auger for what you spent on that blog! What the heck is a blog anyway, and why do we need one???”

So I embarked on this project, knowing full well that I would be stumbling through it like a drunk trying to walk a straight line with an 80-mile an hour headwind.

First,  there are like 400  bazillion WordPress themes to choose from. It took me four weeks to narrow it down to my top three themes. Once having undergone that monumental task, then I couldn’t decide between the three. They all had things I liked, and options I wanted.

I have never been an “out of the box” kind of gal. I thought, if only I could put all three of the themes together to come up with an amazing super theme! Then I had to ask myself some hard questions, like do I know how to do HTML and PHP  code? Hmmm…maybe,  if I only knew what they are — that might help. So, I did what every respectable Ranch Wife Ninja does — I Googled them! It turns out HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language and PHP stands for Hypertext Preprocessor.

O.K., so I quickly determined that even though I am a somewhat computer savvy gal, and now know what HTML and PHP code are, I have no idea how to use them. So, no, putting together my own “perfect”  Wordpress them isn’t going to be an option. So I did what any sensible Ranch Wife Ninja would do, I  wrote the theme names on a piece of paper and systematically chose one through the process of elimination by saying:

Eeny meeny miney mo
Catch a piglet by the toe
If he hollers make him pay
Fifty dollars every day
My mother told me to pick the very best one and you-are-not-it!

With that decision behind me I spent another two weeks customizing the theme, and believe I now have accounts and memberships to every free service offered on the internet that deals with setting up a WordPress theme. If I ever decide to build another blog, I will have to start over, as although I thought I was carefully writing down user names and passwords to each account, I’ll be danged if I can find them now!

Once I got the blog set up and decided on a host using the same eeny meeny selection system as above and chose a domain name I called my friend, Glenda to give her the good news.

“My blog is live!” I shrieked like Dr. Frankenstein when his monster showed signs of life. “I did it!”

I hear key tapping as she gets on her computer.

“I see you have a home page, a page to sell your books and a contact page, but where’s your blog?”

“My what? Dang, I thought this was my blog,” I said.

“No, you have a website, now you need to blog on it, you know, write —  your blog is where you write about your life on the ranch and anything else that interests you,” she said.

So, I go to my computer and Google “how to blog… .” It comes back with  “about 2,370,000,000 results.”

I can see this might take awhile to get it right.

I’ve found I have to be really patient in order to effectively procrastinate. And since patience is apparently a desired virtue,  I need all the virtue I can get, so I’m going to practice some more patience on this blog and go play with the calves now.