This is the first real post for my new blog. This post will hopefully soon be buried beneath many other posts, so for those readers who have read so many to get back to the very beginning: I’m dreadfully sorry. At least this is where this terrifying rabbit hole ends. For those who have come by at the very beginning, or worse, had this post show up on their ds106 feed — it’s not too late to leave!

For those brave enough to continue, I’d like to briefly lay out the purpose of this post. Quite simply, it’s a short explanation of one of the problems I had setting up this blog (Although not the site or domain — that’s another post for another time), and how I fixed it. This is very early in the semester, and what I’ve done so far is largely preliminary. To borrow the phrasing about “building my own digital space,” if this were a real building project, I’d still be digging post holes around the property at this point.

The same night that I got the domain and webhosting set up, I began the process to create a blog. I went through most of the process to do so (Click on the blue smiley? Check. File in another login and password that I won’t remember? Check. Silently begin to hate Jim Groom, just as he foretold? Checked about four hours ago) before giving up and going to bed before finishing. I had to get up at 6:30 the next morning for an internship, and I reasoned that there would be plenty of time to do so the next day.

But when I went to finish, I had to begin the process all over again. And there was a problem: it wouldn’t work. This was apparently because the “blog” directory I’d created before still existed. I briefly considered creating a new directory with a different name, but this was both not what we were told to do as well as definitively lame. (deliberatelysnarky.com/weblog? Ugh.) My first instinct was to just wait until Tuesday and tell Jim Groom that I had a problem, but I rejected this idea, as that seemed like an awful long time to not have a working website.

So instead I decided to find and destroy the problem.

Of course, I had no idea how to do this. I’ve blogged before — xanga, blogspot, and Word Press were all subject to varying degrees of abuse at my calloused fingers — but I’ve never run my own site before, and I didn’t know my way around the control panel.

So I did what any self-respecting child of the digital age would do: I screwed around with random crap that I didn’t understand until I found what I wanted.

Or at least, thought that I wanted. Of course, nothing clearly mentioned deleting or modifying directories anywhere — or even mentioned them at all — but I found what I thought was it under the File Manager, with the subfile www. and the further subfile named “blog.” I figured that this was either the directory, or the subdomain that I’d already created, and that since this was a new site, I didn’t have much to lose, so I deleted it, and went through the whole process of creating a new directory and installing Word Press again.

And it worked!

This was, of course, a fairly simple problem. Jim Groom could probably have fixed it for me in 30 seconds. But I’d done it myself. And for a moment there, I suddenly knew what Gardener Campbell and Jim Groom were talking about when they said “carving out your own digital space.” For just a moment, faster than my inner Sunday School Teacher could stop, I thought –

“That’s right bitches. This is mine.”