The chaos that surrounds my workspace is not responsible for making my head hurt (although, if I posted a full view image of my desk you’d see why it might be a contender!). Actually, it was a blog related situation that set off the exploding neurons. You see, before I posted my blog today, I decided it was time to finally put a blog feed to my Amazon author page. Instructions said to enter your feed location. That sounds simple doesn’t it?
My first search on feeds for WordPress told me to simply put /feed/ after my domain name, like this www.kellycochran.com/feed/, but when I tested it, I got the dreaded “404 Page not found.” So, I proceeded to try every variation I could with dismal results. Then I realized that most of the advice I was finding was for people using WordPress.com, not WordPress.org. Did you even know there was a difference?
I narrowed my search to RSS feeds using WordPress.org (the product used when you are self-hosting your blog instead of hosting it with WordPress). Two hours later, after reading about RSS, RSS2, Atom, and Permalinks, I finally figured out that I had to include a ? and a = in there somewhere.
Does your head hurt yet?
I can only imagine what it is like for a new author who doesn’t know a lot about computers. I’m one of the lucky ones, an author whose background is in computers. I worked in the information systems industry for more than twenty years, designing and developing computer systems. In fact, one of my favorite things was to debug computer programs, reading hex dumps and all that techno babble.
Although I did create my own website, I am still struggling in today’s tech heavy world. I was a late comer to Facebook, was never on MySpace, and didn’t tweet a word (or 140 characters) until after I published my first book. I haven’t Tumblr’d or Vined, or Instamgram’d either.
If it isn’t the technology I’m struggling with, it’s the time. It takes a lot of time to keep up with the social media. Right now, my focus is on blogging on a regular basis, and so far it seems to be working. What should I conquer next, Twitter?
If you are reading this blog on my Amazon author page, then what I did worked!
Kudos on getting RSS figured out! I haven’t mastered that at all. And I used to be a programmer. Albeit a mainframe programmer, but still, some of this stuff is baffling, and very poorly documented!
Kelly, you can’t imagine what my work space looks like. If you could, you would feel better about yours. As for Facebook, I’m there, but very rarely. I don’t tweet or text, by choice. I’m updating my website now, and it’s not easy because Go Daddy has a new format now that they claim is easier to maneuver. Not!
Kelly…you are so far ahead of me. I not only don’t know how to do all of those things, but I have never even HEARD of most of them. 🙂 Such a smart lady, as well as sweet and talented. I’m still waiting to join Aspen in her second adventure.