Darn technology!

If you’re experiencing tech vexation, I empathize.

I’m not a technophobe. I don’t shy away from learning to use a new device or application. But setting up this blog had me so flustered that I signed a note to a friend with her name instead of mine.

Constructing a website on Blogger, my choice of a platform because of its reputation for simplicity, was harder than expected. Unlike the now-defunct ChicagoNow, on which I used to blog, it required importing widgets for subscribing and, I mistakenly thought, commenting. Those tasks were nightmarish.

After publishing the first post, I emailed friends and relatives with the link and instructions for subscribing. Quite a few people told me that they quit filling in the subscribe widget because their emails were not showing up as they typed.

Fretting that potential subscribers were giving up, I bothered those I was confident would subscribe with another email informing them that the widget worked even though their typing would be invisible.

When Elfsight, the widget provider, sent out a customer satisfaction survey, I complained about the widget’s supposed flaw and got a response: the settings indicated white type. I may have unwittingly clicked on that nonsensical option. 

Soon after email addresses were finally displaying in black, Elfsight notified me that I’d nearly reached the limit of 200 monthly views for a free plan. The widget could be pulled the next day unless I upgraded to a paid plan. I panicked and paid.

The Elfsight contact heard from me again. There would be nowhere near 200 views a month once the kinks were ironed out, I said. The views were almost all mine. Informed that I browsed in Safari, she said that my own views would not count if Safari were set to allow cookies and cross-site tracking. You can guess that my settings were the opposite.

I published a second post and, having subscribed myself, eagerly awaited Elfsight’s email announcing it. Ninety minutes passed with no notice. Once more I turned to the patient Elfsight contact and heard another surprise. Its subscription function does not work as I expected from my ChicagoNow experience. 

Elfsight gives me subscribers’ email addresses; it doesn’t notify subscribers of new posts. So I emailed subscribers about the post, in my frustration incorrectly entering an @ instead of a dot in the URL. Another email was needed to correct the mistake. Could this blog launch get any more embarrassing?

It occurred to me that I hadn’t even needed Elfsight, since all subscribers are relatives and friends. But maybe I’ll be lucky and get subscriptions from strangers.

The other recommended form is for comments. I chose ad-free, no-tracking CommentBox, placed the HTML code into Blogger’s layout settings, and spent many maddening hours investigating why the form didn’t work. The code mysteriously duplicated when saved, which a CommentBox contact thought was causing the problem. I couldn’t stop the duplication and reached out to the Blogger help community. A “diamond product expert” responded that he was stymied by a problem he’d never seen before. I asked his recommendation for another comment form.

“I’ve had pretty good experience with the standard Blogger comments,” he replied. Blogger has a comment form! I thought I had read that Blogger had eliminated it. All that angst was unnecessary.

The Blogger helper also suggested that I insert a “jump break” into a post so that only the beginning would display on the top page. A “read more” click would take readers to the full post’s individual page with its own comment form. Perfect!

Now, fingers crossed, the format is settled and I can concentrate on composing. Some lessons from the experience:

• Seek help. It can be intimidating for a tech amateur to put a problem out to those you perceive as tech wizards, but I would not have known about Blogger’s comment form or jump break had I not reached out to the Blogger community. I was answered politely and in understandable language.

• Don’t assume that a function will work the same as a previous one you’re familiar with. I fretted myself into a tizzy waiting for a new post notice from Elfsight that wasn’t going to arrive.

• Be patient and don’t hurry to launch. Fix problems before you go public. I could have held off for a functioning comment form before publishing. I should have asked whether Elfsight had a solution for invisible email addresses.

• Take a different tack. Even after the experts could not solve the comment problem, I entered and deleted the CommentBox code over and over again, as if another attempt would produce a different result. I hadn’t known about Blogger’s comment form yet, but I could have tried a form from another provider.

• Use stress-reducing practices and don’t berate yourself as technologically inept. You’re not unusually obtuse. Technology is complicated and can be frustrating, especially when it’s new to you and you’re over a certain age. We unfairly expect ourselves to understand what we’ve never been taught. After the problems were resolved, I congratulated myself for learning a bit about web page construction.