The Beginning

Because two of my grown-up children have been fooling around with blogs for a while, and because my new Office 2007 software claims to let me post blogs easily right out of the Word program, I thought I would spend a snowy afternoon setting up a blog account and learning how to use it. As always, there were problems. First, it turns out I already had a Blogger account, that I apparently created some forgotten time in the past. Getting over that hurdle, I updated my profile and then attempted to register the blog with Word 2007, which kept showing me a Help page that did not answer my questions. Word 2007 insists that I have to have a picture provider and directs me to provide the posting URL and the source URL; Blogger tells me I can post pictures and mentions no URLs. Word's answer to that is to tell me to select the "My blog provider" entry … except that I cannot find any such entry to select! Apparently this is not going to be easy.

I then decided to just insert a desired picture into the posting in Word and see if it would go up. That went through another bit of confusion, but I finally got a picture in the posting file, except that it was very much oversize. Recalling what I had to do to resize a picture to include it in an E-mail, I went through that same process … and got the same oversized picture.

 

Then I simply shrunk the picture by pulling its ends in toward the center—but I know in my heart of hearts that this is not a good approach, because the actual size of the picture (that is, the number of bits) remains the same, meaning that the size will be much to large to be on the Web, slowing everything down. At this point, however, the intent was simply to see if the picture gets included, so I persevered.

The result, however, was that the text got there fine (although it took me a while to find it, not only because I did not understand that I had to search out my own title but also because I kept getting distracted looking at other people's blogs) … but there was no picture (that's the space between the second and third paragraphs). I obviously need more time at the drawing board, but I am getting hungry, so I am going upstairs to eat. Eventually there will be pictures; that's my new New Year's resolution – along with committing myself to exercising every day before breakfast, going to the gym at least three times a week, and learning French and Spanish. Ciao.