Crikey! Starting a blog is hard

For the last few weeks I have been actively encouraged by PIL and my sister to start a blog. I’m not sure why but they say that I write emails and texts in a nice, slightly amusing way. So I thought “Why not”. I started looking into it because I do like to do a bit of research and initially what I read on-line seemed to indicate that starting a blog takes anywhere between 10 to 20 minutes. Bollocks it does! To be frank, I am not the most tech savvy person on the planet and to a degree I shy away from technology. I remember a couple of years ago listening to Larry Wotshisname from Google and he said that everyone on the planet now has a smart phone. I had a steam powered Nokia 3510 in my pocket!It has its place but I think that too many people rely on technology far too much. So it would take me longer than most to get started because I’m such a dinosaur but that’s not the real issue in setting up and starting a blog. What everyone who goes on-line and says “Hey, want to start a blog? Come to my site and together we can set it up in no time and I’ll only charge you a hundred bucks” fails to mention is that you need to make an absolute mass of decisions before you can launch the bloody thing. Stuff like hosted or not, what platform to use and what to call the damned thing in the first place. The name of my blog took ages to decide upon with suggestions coming in thick and fast from my kids and PIL. Most of them were derogatory as you’d imagine and ranged from ‘myworthlesslife’ to ‘whatwhome’ via ‘knobofbutter’. Selecting WordPress was pretty much a no brainer. It gave me what I needed in a simple way but then I had to decide on a theme and there are hundreds of them! Want a blog for your restaurant? There are loads. One for photography? Groovy cos we got tons. Take your pick! Gardening blog? Shed loads of themes. WordPress really are a swiss army knife for blog themes. I’m sure if you look and customise enough you’ll find one that removes small stones from a horses hoof. And no, WordPress aren’t paying me for saying this. So days were spent looking at the hundreds that WordPress offer before a decision was made. Once that was done the rest really was simple and took next to no time for the blog to be set up. However, once that bit has been sorted you can customise the theme you’ve chosen and that could take me ages. I decided not to go down that route too far as it’s something you can go back and do at a future time. Plus. of course, it might be nice to see the site evolve over a period of time. I wanted to get this off the ground sooner rather than later and I’d already spent ages deciding on all kinds of things. Using WordPress also brings some pleasant surprises. One of the first things I did was to write-up the “About” section. Then because I’ve never done this before I thought it would be nice to say that I “liked” that entry. Lo and behold, shortly afterwards I received an email from WordPress saying “You liked your own post on iplonker. You’re so vain. You probably think ‘About’ is about you”! Fantastic. A sense of humour. Excellent, I love that particularly as it took the piss.  So if you decide to start a blog then go for it but ignore all the crap about it being something to do in your lunchtime. You have to make a shed load of decisions beforehand. Once you’ve done that then it really is very easy. Even I can do it and that’s saying something. I won’t mention the amount of help I received from my youngest son. It will just go to his head and he’ll start demanding money, the mercenary swine. During the course of many hours of researching blogs, reading and enjoying other people’s blog and looking at any number of sites explaining how to set up and publicise a blog, I noticed how often “monetising” a blog was referred to. What an ugly word! Got to have been a banker who came up with that and probably, with respect to everyone in the US, it was an American banker that considered that a good word. Us Brits only ever come up with truly good words like “twerp”, “twit”, “bollocks” (my personal favourite), “wanker” and of course “plonker”. It appears to me that to do “monetise” a blog you must have to offer some kind of advisory service or start a website offering expertise. I have no particular talents. I’m not very good at DIY, I have no talent for car or motorcycle maintenance and as I’ve already stated I’m rubbish with technology. So I decided that as I have no talent or specific knowledge on any subject I would offer my advise on something I have experienced. As I have absolutely no medical training apart from a course on “First Aid at Work” I did 20 odd years ago, I thought, on my first ever blog, I would offer advise on a medical matter:

Kidney Stones.

Don’t get them.

They fucking hurt!

I hope you have enjoyed reading my first ever blog as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it. Please feel free to press the good old “Like” button and follow me on this journey in the future. I would love to read your comments too, so please take a moment and let me know what you think.

More to follow really soon. Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Dick Dastardly