Technology and me

Only people more than thirty years old will be able to understand what I am about to say concerning technology. I learned my keyboarding skills in high school on an old Corona manual typewriter. The teacher would smack us on the back of our hands with a ruler if we allowed our wrists to drop or she thought we were making too many errors. The hours I spent in that classroom learning how to type seems, now, like a nightmare. I would leave class with sore fingers from pressing down on the keys--it takes a lot of pressure to imprint a keystroke from a manual typewriter. More often, the backs of my hands would be sore from receiving swats from the dreaded ruler. I guess she did her job, because I've always retained my ability to type. Go figure!

The next greatest thing was the electric typewriter. What a godsend that was! Even greater, was the correction tape that they came out with. If you miskeyed a stroke then you simply inserted this tape into the typewriter and typed over the stroke and replaced it with the correct letter. It was light years ahead of "Whiteout" which was like a white paint that you had to blow on and let dry before you could make a correction. I can remember spending hours and hours typing a two or three page paper. Many of those hours were used to correct miskeyed strokes. Luckily, however, very few papers were required to be typed when I was in high school. I think that teachers understood the hassles that typing imposed, and they would allow us to turn in our papers in long-hand as long as the writing was legible. I wonder now how office people who typed for a living ever did their jobs. It had to be tough.

Creating this Blog

From this blog you will find out that I am a minimalist. I cannot seem to remove the core of the tech writer in me that says, "less is more." Everything that I do is meant to conserve my time and yours. As a result, I want to create a blog that is easy to read, navigate, and has minimal distractions.

I chose blogger.com as my site because I have used it before. We are creatures of habit, and I see no reason to try something new. It's an easy site to use; however, it comes with a limited amount of versatility unless you are willing to play with the html code to add a custom look. Blogger allows you to adjust the code for your purposes. Otherwise, you are stuck with the themes they offer and can only tweak them through their dashboard which is limited in its abilities. But again, I am for ease and speed over "eye candy."

The theme I chose for this blog was. and it should come as no surprise, "Minima." So here I am trying to figure out a way to customize my site without cluttering it up, but at the same time avoiding the perception that it was "done on the fly." The whole concept messes me up. How would I grade a student who does beautiful document design, but that student has trouble writing a correct sentence? How should it compare to a student who writes beautifully, but their blog site looks like it was done with minimal effort? After all, I guess "eye candy" does serve a purpose. Don't worry, eventually I will put in the "eye candy."