iBlog 54 Where Are You? 


How technology can screw the career of a budding blogger (who nobody reads anyway). 

Wow, what a coincidence!! I just checked to see the first date I started blogging. Almost 3 years ago to the day, I entered my first blog piece using blogging software called iBlog. At first I was quite excited about this new communication venue, and shared it with many of my friends. Some were complementary and sincere, some were lukewarm, and some were mute. I gradually came to understand a couple of things. One, while my life is not exactly a wasteland of ennui, few people want to pore over the details of my day-to-day existence; they're too busy dealing with their own details. Nor am I a gifted writer, barring that occasional exception. And two, I needed to seek my blogging success in the domain of the already blogging-podcasting-twittering-facebooking crowd. That turned out to be mildly intimidating. I finally decided just to use it as a journaling technique and not worry about readership—admitting, essentially, that whatever I was doing, I wasn't blogging.

What really gave me blogger's block, however, was a failure of technology. Back in 2004, a guy by the name of Sarat Kongara had written this quite intuitive and useful piece of blogging software called iBlog. I liked it because it was moderately flexible and adaptable and also had categories for your blog entries, unlike the blogging solution Apple offers with iWeb today. It took me just a couple of weeks to learn the ins and outs of iBlog, and I was off to the new adventure. Unfortunately, along the way, iBlog stopped being a little gem. The support was slow (but there), and I found a support forum, ibloggers.net, that was very helpful, especially the guy with the screen name "icerabbit."

But what really brought the sky falling down was Apple's new operating system Leopard. Being the early adaptor that I am, naturally I wanted Leopard ASAP. However, iBlog was only ONE of the pieces of software that would not run under Leopard. I bought their Intel PowerBook having visions of blogging from Bread Company, but after one new publish from iBlog, my site was totally screwed up. AND after a few weeks, the guys at ibloggers.net disappeared without a trace. No support. I refused to drag my iMac G4 to the Bread Company, but I was steamed about this.

Worse than the anger and frustration was that my inner blogger was dealt a nearly fatal blow to his self-confidence. No matter where I turned, I didn't seem to be able to get the right information to stay with the old version of iBlog I had or switch to a new system like typepad, wordpress or eblogger. Nothing looked good to me, either staying the same or changing. There seemed to be insurmountable problems no matter what I did. I quit writing with any regularity, and what I did write, for the first time, seemed uninspired. I came to the painful conclusion that, for the first time in 25 years, Apple Computer and iBlog had individually and collectively failed me.

To be continued . . .  

Posted: Wed - October 22, 2008 at 05:11 PM          

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