Blogging for the technically challenged

I asked one of my favourite Canadian bloggers, Lisa MacColl, to describe her experience using Blogspot as a response to my story about using WordPress. Here’s Lisa’s post:

When Tracey asked me to write a guest post about Blogspot, I declined at first. I don’t know the first thing about the technicalities of Blogspot. I just write stuff and post it. She said that was okay, so here I am. If you’re looking for a technical explanation, you might as well click away now. You won’t hurt my feelings. I am the poster child for blogging for the technologically challenged.

Since I was a child, writing was my way of surviving the world around me. I could be absolutely honest in my scribblings, in a world that often required following a “don’t think, don’t ask, don’t feel and don’t tell” mantra. I started writing poetry as a way of releasing emotion that otherwise would have killed me eventually. To this day, I am very particular about who gets to read my poetry. It’s the raw, unvarnished me, and it took me well into my 40s to stop being a “who do you want me to be” chameleon and accept who I was, take it or leave it.

So when blogging came along, it seemed like a natural expressive progression. Problem was, I am a techno-wienie and I knew nothing about coding, html or other such things. I just wanted to write things and share them because our commonalities are so much more than our differences, and finding out that other people have walked or are walking the same path makes life friendlier. I enjoyed reading blog posts, so I thought I would give it a go.

I decided to go with Blogspot because it seemed pretty straightforward. Choose a template, spiffy it up and start typing and hit post. I started blogging at a time when my small child was only in school part-time, I was trying to build a freelance writing career and my mom was starting to need more care. I didn’t have time to learn something that required complex machinations to get the words out into the ether. I just wanted to type and go.

WordPress is the blog creator, site, not sure what the word is, of people who are serious about blogging. I also listened to any number of my creative friends beating their heads against a wall due to its complications and persnickety nature. The end result is definitely worth the effort, but I didn’t have the time to MAKE the effort when I started blogging. I needed something easy.

Bloggspot isn’t as complicated as WordPress, although one of these years I’m going to learn that puppy. In the meantime, it gets the job done. It has lots of great templates that can be customized, I get decent analytics, I can upload simple photos and move them around, I can set notifications to know when someone has commented, I can moderate, post and delete the comments, and for a non-technical person, it works for me.

I write two blogs: The Sandwich Chronicles, which details my juggling of my mom’s deteriorating health, my daughter’s challenges and my fight to stay sane in the middle of it. Lisa Mac’s Musings is a hodgepodge of random observations, rants and commentary. They are both on Blogspot. Stop by and check them out!