Today I learned more than I ever wanted to know about HTML.

Welcome to our new and improved blog layout! YaY! :)

I'm going to jump right in because I am easily impressed with this little learning tidbit, and I'm sure there's someone else out there in the World Wide Web who hasn't figured it out yet either... I know how to do the accented " é " now! You simply hold down the "Alt" key and type 130 on your number pad (not above the letters - the ones over to the side...) and when you let go of the "Alt" button your little é pops up! Tah-Dah!  é  
*Sigh*  :) It's the little things.

Alrighty, then. So, the most time-consuming thing I learned today was my crash course on Blogging 101. I’ve only been doing this for a few weeks now and I have been pleasantly surprised by the amount of interest this little project has generated. I am getting five times the number of visits I had in the first week. (Wait. Is that right? Carry the one…add the seven…and…um… It looks like I need to pencil in a lesson on “basic math on only a couple hours of sleep.” :)

At any rate, I never dreamed I’d be up to triple-digits per day by now. Although, I noticed that my BlogSpot odometer seems to be stuck at 140. It’s been stuck there for about a week now. I keep tapping it, but the thing doesn’t budge. Ah, well. My other counter is working just fine, and if people are posting messages they’ve obviously been here. Unless they are ninjas. Hmm…

Well, anyway, upon seeing the amount of traffic the site is getting I decided it was time to take it up a notch and get my blog some fancier duds. So today I tackled templates and layouts and screen ratios. Even learned a little Photoshop pointers in there. And the dreaded HTML. Which, by the way is hard to is a hard process to translate for my readers...

This is the code for italic:

Add Your Words In Here

See the problem?

I suppose I could put spaces in between everything.

But I'll leave HTML Lessons to the experts.

And when I learned all I could about formatting my website and how to make it three columns and where to just get an easy template that I could download (Thank you Deluxe Templates!) and I couldn't get any further, I called in . . . My Reinforcement.

Super Hubby to the Rescue!

Handsome. Intelligent. Government-trained. Makes the world's best pancakes. My Hubby tried out for The Geek Squad and was turned down because he was overqualified. I knew he was the one I needed for this job. Only he and his Computer Fu could untangle me from the treacherous clutches of the evil and sinister Hypertext that held my remaining brain cells captive.

"Help!" I cried. (Well . . . texted.) "I found a new template but I can't figure this thing out!"

"Aha! I see your problem here! It's not compatible. You'd need Google Chrome for this template and so would all your trusty readers! You must find a different template that will free you from such glitches!"

"Thank you Super Hubby!"

Hehe.

Alright, so it went a little more like this...

~~~~~~

Hubby:

"Alright, Sweetie. Now you gotta click on that link there. No. The other one. Yeah. That one. Did you click it? Hmm. It's not going there. Try clicking it again."

Me:

"Yeesh! I'm clicking it already. Give me a minute."

Hubby:

"You know, you can make the images bigger if you..."

Me:

-groan- "I KnoW that already! What am I, in kindergarten?"

Hubby:

"I was just trying to be helpful. . . in case you didn't know about that."

Me:

"Oh. Well, I already knew that."

Hubby:

"Well, I'm just used to giving specific information when I'm going through the process."

Me:

"Well, I already know that."

Of course five seconds later he mentioned another thing that I already knew how to do and again I was quick to assert my knowledge on that laughably microscopic corner of his stomping grounds.

~~~~~~

So here's what I realized that I learned today.

My husband is one of the most patient people I have ever met, and that is one secret to his success in providing such good tech support. When we lived in Japan our conversations with family would often turn to tech support problems. My husband spent hours guiding his mom through the process of accessing her e-mail account or helping my dad trouble-shoot a  problem on his computer. He would patiently guide them through every step of the process, even if it were obvious to him what needed to be done because it was in that order of things he usually found the problem. It was often some step that was missed or little thing that would have been overlooked if he had not been so meticulous.

It's a fairly obvious lesson - without order, there's disorder.

Tonight I learned to appreciate the simple fact that patience and order go hand in hand.

Thanks, Super Hubby.

It's a lesson we probably all need from time to time.

Touché!

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I have been brain-storming about new lesson ideas and I have quite a few collected.

I asked Waybums what she wanted to learn about and she said...

"Well, mother. I'd like to learn about chickens."

So if there are any chickens out there willing to give lessons,

you'll have to keep me posted...