Preliminary Advice for someone new to computer land as well as blog land:

Before you start anything, make sure you know about your search engine’s capacity, how to clear your browser and delete your cookies (or that you’ve scheduled clearing on a regular basis, I have mine set up to clear every time I shut down the internet). Make sure internet access is current and up-to-date. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, speak to your internet provider. Make sure you have good anti-virus software and that you have password protected as much of your stuff as you can; this would include, access to the computer itself, all of your email accounts, access to your wi-fi (if you’re using it), etc. If you’re not sure, do research, this is a buyer beware market. Keep your passwords in a safe place and don’t write them on the back of things. Make sure you have pop-up blockers and honestly, if you want to watch porn – buy it! It’ll cost you less in the long run and p.s. it’s so much easier to hide DVDs than your browser history, trust me! (But be advised you may need to disengage some of your pop-up blockers and change certain settings in order to load certain programs and files. Getting to know when and how to do this takes time. Be patient.)

Make sure you have a good computer (or a lot of patience); your memory capacity, internet access and internal hard drive all affect the loading time of web pages, how many you can load, etc. if your computer is too old it may not even be able to load and run your internet access properly.

Again, most people may think this is stating the obvious but I think it’s so mean how people talk on the internet like you’re already supposed to know all this stuff automatically. How’s that supposed to happen if no one tells you? I don’t think many people consider how overwhelming the internet might be to a newb and why it’s so hard for people who aren’t computer savvy to get interested. Sure you can find all the information after researching for a billion hours. Like who automatically knows that if your pages aren’t loading properly it’s probably just a matter of clearing your cache or deleting your cookies and highly unlikely that you need to call tech support? But most people who are on the net have known this for a long time and therefore assume you should too.

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If you are comfortable with all of the above and feel comfortable in the land of the world-wide web then perhaps you are ready to consider blogging. Now I’m looking at blogging in hopes of earning an income, so I am going to do a lot of research before I do anything active and then start my blog (where this information will eventually go). But if you just want to set up a blog and start writing go to http://www.wordpress.com , set up a blog for free and fill your boots.

There are million sites out there telling you “steps to doing a blog for beginners” etc. i.e.:

Step 1 – determine your audience (I don’t agree with this myself, at least not at this point in my journey)

Step 2 – determine if you are capable of blogging.

This means, do you have a lot to say? Do you think you can keep writing on a daily basis? Are you ready for people to criticize and slam your blog? (I assume this will happen to me, at this juncture this is all being done on a word processor and I’m plunking a multitude of pages on my blog all at once when I go live.) This means I’ll have comments and questions. Are you going to have time to respond to people in a timely fashion? (Follow-up note, that was wishful thinking, so far I haven’t really been able to engage people on my blog.) (I plan on researching this later today.)

Now of course, nothing’s written in stone – you can just stop blogging anytime. You can change your topic, you can win the lottery and not need to blog – or maybe you want to blog about winning the lottery and how it’s affected you at any rate, you can be fickle too – in fact web hosts, domain name sellers and the like are counting on it. It’s sort of like gym memberships, if everyone went the gyms would be screwed, they depend especially on the likes of me and my last membership and how I only went a handful of times the whole year but still paid $45 a month. Okay, I guess this is more a note to myself more than anything else but meh, maybe it’ll help you too.

Toodles for now my lovelies, back to the net to do more research and see if I can’t do something to get this show on the road!