My Year As A Dog. Part 1, in which I blame Mr Prab.

It's 7 more sleeps to Christmas. Not many people have been popping in here the last week. Even my long-suffering friends and family have better things to do [shame on you] - like drinking too much, trimming trees, packing for holidays and, you know, having a life.

So I've decided that now's a jolly good time to surreptitiously put together some thoughts on my 1st year ever of blogging. Just for my record. I'm anal about commemorating special times.

My report will start right after the ho-ho-ho! So if you stumbled in here and don't want to proceed with a ho-hum report [or 3] on my dogblogging experience, go away now.

ho-ho-ho!

Julie famously started her blog with A Plan.

Until I started blogging, I'd never heard of Julie. As such, I had no plan on Day 1, and still don't 11 months later.

After my 1st post, I needed only the encouragement of a single follower Mr Prab, to NOT delete the whole thing and consider it a wasted hour.

Over the next few weeks, Mr Prab kindly commented that my layout sucked. My sister 2 agreed. The Other Half told me that words were willy-nilly breaking up everywhere and my prized carefully selected pictures were overlapping.

"Pleasssse everyone..." I hissed. "You know I'm not a web geniussss. It'sss a free template and a free blog. Ssssstop complaining already."

Being a web genius, Mr Prab told me he'd help beautify it soon. That was 10 months ago, my face is bright blue, and I think he may already be too late.

About 6 months after I started blogging, I found out that all my pictures were going to something called picasa web albums. I had A Very Big Duh? Moment.

After which I went to have a look at this mysterious album. I discovered that I'd somehow managed to use almost 60% of my alloted free storage. There's a limit to free storage? I was horrified. It must have been in the fine print of course. You see how, despite my [occasional] ranting and [sometime] pessimism, I have [a misplaced and naive] faith in the generosity of the human race?

The Duh? Moment was quickly replaced by a Quick, Kill Me Now! Moment before I heroically decided to go back to post #1 and start cleaning up the mess. It took me more than a few days and nights to go through every single post I'd ever made but [pat on back], ruthless hours of deletions and re-publishing later, I miraculously found myself using under 45% of storage again.

I'm telling you this because, if you once thought you saw a picture of your dog on this blog and told nanna who then told her knitting club who all had a look and saw nothing, at least now, you know why. Sorry, but something had to go.

As the months flew by, I discovered, from hours of googling and lurking, that there are many types of dogblogs. I will talk about these in Part 2 because my neck is killing me and I'm typing standing up.

Until then.


Some lessons I've learnt from My 1st Year Of Blogging: THE SHORT VERSION.
1. Have a plan.
2. Read the fineprint.
3. Don't type too long or you'll have a sore neck.
4. Don't believe anyone named Mr Prab.

Gratuitous photo of dog since this is a dogblog.