Originally posted on 3/27/08 at http://likesalmon.wordpress.com/
This was originally a reply to liverbones’ comment of my last post, but it became long so I gave it a home of its own.
Just about every day I run across some design or technical problem that I can only solve through blogs or message boards. Its an amazing resource, and I couldn’t get by without it. However, I find that the solutions are often lacking.
The problem is that the tech guru who is answering the question usually figured out the thing in question long ago, and can’t remember quite what their personal “Ah HAH!” moment was. So they leave the little stuff out. For instance, if you’re not used to linux command line stuff, and you install something that you have to initialize through the command line, you cannot just type in shell$ foo and expect it to work. Most likely, the command foo is not in your path. So you actually have to go to the file where the program is, then type in shell$ ./foo. The “.” tells your computer that the command can be found in this directory. But ask a linux guru how to initialize a program, and she will tell you “Just type in foo” at the command line. Its not that they don’t know how to do it right, its that they know it so well that they forgot to tell you. This why the best answers come from bloggers who are right in the heat of the moment, still trying to figure it out when they post.
For instance, I posted my GoDaddy entry just yesterday. But I had been working on getting wordpress set up on GoDaddy for hours. Actually, to be honest, days. This blog helped, as did the comments on this post, but it made everything seem so easy. Fact is, when I first uploaded the site, nothing worked at all.
I struggled with the wp-config file forever. Then I enabled pretty urls, which broke everything, and spent several hours downloading and uploading the .htaccess file trying to modify just the right thing. It was only after I gave up (because of a blog post that mentioned if you just wait, everything will work), waited two days, and tried again that it worked. Instantly. For no reason at all.
So my point is, because I treasure the thoughtful, generous people who document their sometimes painful journey through the trials of learning how to do stuff with computers, I am going to start blogging while I’m still trying to figure shit out.