All Posts Tagged With: "newbies"

How to Create a Blog - Part 12

March 6th, 2009 • stephenlawes • 0 comments • Related • Filed Under

My Newbie Blog is visited every day by people with questions about how to create a blog.  I was thinking back about my own blogging journey and how it has changed over time.  I have spent most of my life working with computers.   My first exposure to a computer was in 1972 at a terminal that allowed you to play a game of sorts where you would type in where what room you thought something was in and the computer would give you clues to help find whatever you were looking for. This terminal was more like a typewriter than anything we would call a computer today.  IN 1979 I went to college and took a class in Fortran.  Fortran was a computer language that worked by using a type pad to make a a deck of cards and then the cards were fed into the main computer.  It was a very time consuming process.  In the early 80’s I had a Radio Shack Color Computer and I could go on Compuserve which was a big deal at the time.

I eventually ended up selling computers and can remember the first IBM’s coming out with the two floppy disk drives.

Seagate introduced a 20 MB Hard Disk and I remember thinking that no one could ever use 20 MB of Hard Disk space.  And then came Windows and you needed at least 40 MB of Hard Disk Space.  And on and on ……………….

What does all that have to do with creating a blog?  I guess I am amazed at where things are now and I am wondering what they will look like 10 or 20 years from now.  I would encourage all of you newbies to keep your eyes open to look for ways to utilize the Internet and be ready to go with the changes that come along.  I am sure we haven’t seen anything yet!

Newbies (noobs) are People, Too!

March 4th, 2008 • stephenlawes • 0 comments • Related • Filed Under

I will never forget the moment. Having struggled through getting a domain name and web hosting, wrestling to get WordPress installed and finally, there it was….my first blog! I sat staring at the strangely blue WordPress Kubric theme with the tagline saying “Just another WordPress weblog” and that haunting post blaring “Hello Word”! This for me was the quintessential newbie (noob) moment. The moment of extreme newbieness. What now????? How do I start a blog? How do I create a blog? Help!

newbie1.JPG

I scanned the page. “Welcome to WordPress”. That was nice. “This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!” What? Start blogging? How do I edit it? How do I delete it? Start blogging where? I continued to scan the page. What in the world is Meta? A blogroll? What have I gotten myself into? It was all questions and no answers and that for me defines what it feels like to be a newbie (noob). Maybe you have been blogging for so long that you can’t relate, but I bet a lot of you can. I still get those newbie moments sometimes. Those unexplainable moments when something that has always worked before suddenly doesn’t work.

Blogging Advice for Newbies

What did I do? I just started to plug away at it one step at a time. As I did I kept notes and took screen shots and turned the journey into My Newbie Blog (noob). I wrote an article called Create a Blog You Can be Proud Of (The Who, What, Why, Where, When and How of Starting a Blog) which details step by step the process of getting to that first newbie moment I described in the beginning of the story. Then I wrote articles about permalinks and categories, installing WordPress Themes, installing WordPress Plugins, writing in WordPress, Adsense, Keyword Searches, Monetizing, Site Stats, and more. These articles can function as a sort of WordPress tutorial as you attempt to answer that newbie question “How to Create a Blog“.