I’ve known for about a year that I wanted to write a blog, but then, who doesn’t? It seems like everybody and their sister are starting blogs these days, and there is no shortage of folks who have created whole online courses detailing every step in the blogging process.
This very page that you are reading now is courtesy of an email I got from one blogger who was promoting another blogger on her blog about ways to save money. Blogger #1 had a link to Blogger #2’s blog post called ‘Where Can I Blog for Free?’
Now, FREE is the best possible savings, because, well, it’s FREE, as in ‘has no monetary cost’, so I bookmarked that sucker and here we are. Turns out, WordPress.com was Blogger #2’s first pick for a place to set up a blog for free.
I have a hard time resisting ‘free’ stuff. It runs in the family. My dad once said that if Kroger were giving away 50-gallon barrels of dill pickles, my mom would be first in line to get hers — and she doesn’t even like dill pickles.
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been hit with charges for services I didn’t realize I had ordered, until I remembered taking advantage of a free trial. Hey, it’s free, so why not? Well, free for 30 days is different than free for all enduring time. Amazon Prime was an expensive wake up call, but it has turned out to be totally worth the $100 a year. (More on this in a future post.)
WRANGLED TANGLE #1: When you sign up for a free trial that you intend to cancel at the end of the trial period, add a task to your calendar for a day or two BEFORE the last day so you can be sure you won’t be charged.
As I said, I’ve been wanting to try blogging for a few years now. I’ve done a lot of research and joined a Facebook group for beginners, but I was hesitant to go all in and buy the whole web hosting package to get started. The best deal I could find is with Bluehost, but the best rate requires paying for 3 years up front. I had no idea if I was that committed, let alone if I could come up with content that people would actually want to read. What if I sank money into publishing a blog and nobody cared?
Giving myself a ‘free trial’ in the blogging world seemed like the best way to test the waters. And then I opened up WordPress.com and found out how steep the learning curve really is for me. It’s obvious that the folks here have tried to make the process of creating and launching a website as painless as possible, but there are still a lot of moving parts that I just don’t understand. I’m old enough to remember when a Walkman was the ‘latest technology’, so things like ‘plug-ins’, and ‘widgets’ and such are currently beyond my digitally-challenged capabilities.
Still, here I am, wrangling the tangle of building a blog on a free website on WordPress.com.
And that is what ‘Wrangle the Tangle’ is all about.
Cleaning the house while your kids are still at home is like shoveling the driveway while it’s still snowing — Phyllis Diller