I’m seriously beginning to wonder why on earth I decided to start this blog on my own domain.  After days of grappling with the vagaries of WordPress, Google and FTP clients I feel like banging my head against the wall and going back to the nursery with a hosted blog.  I know that I had reasons for registering a domain and getting started on all of this but it’s been a long time since I’ve felt so relentlessly dumb as I have trying to set up a website.

Up until I registered the site a couple of weeks ago I had thought I was computer literate but now I realise that I’m just like any other journo, an expert in the surface matters but just as in need of tech support as any Joe Soap.  As I write this I know, with all the general sinking, annoying frustration of it all, that no one is going to read this post because the Google bots haven’t found me yet.

I feel like someone far down the cast list in a 1950s science fiction film waiting for rescue.  I’m new to the idea of bots and in my mind they’re still large, shiny and man shaped.  In reality they’re anonymous and unfathomable (for the moment anyway).  What I do know for certain though is that they don’t like me.  My site does not have sufficient crumbs of shiny robot food for them to come and take a look.  I can look on Google’s Webmaster applications page (another new discovery) and see that they did in fact visit my site today but left without so much as a hello or a goodbye.

It’s ironic that I’ve spent much of my summer up to my elbows in web searches and Internet sites, while I was writing Devil in the Red Dress.  I can confidently say that I can find most things I look for on line.  The last couple of months have taught me a few more tricks of the trade and I’m just as quick to google as any of my colleagues rather than hit the books these days.  But now that I’m supposed to be adding to the whole World Wide Web phenomenon I’m stumped.  I’ve spent the whole summer searching for sites that weren’t there and finding them and now I’ve got a site that’s not there (at least not as far as Google is concerned).

This is a bit of a pointless rant really.  It’s not really on topic as far as the blog is concerned and by the time anyone can find it my troubles will be over and it will be redundant.  I suppose I’m just writing it down for posterity, so that one day , when I’ve worked out how the hell everything works I can look back on this and laugh.  Also it helps to vent a bit.

With any luck Google’s robots will have come back to made friends in a day or so and this post will actually see the light of day.  Then I can begin the blog in earnest. I hope anyway…