Everybody Wants To Get Into The Act

Now everyone's got a blog of their own.

I don't mean that in the usual, "all the cool kids are doing it" sort of way, since very few of us bloggers are all that cool to begin with. Well, maybe YOU are. You, dear reader, are indeed cool, a veritable mountain of icy hipness, and good for you, I say. But I am not. I wasn't cool when I was young and cared about such things, and at this point in my life I am not even going to pretend. Soon my children will be teenagers and will let me know, in ways both subtle and profound, how uncool I am, and I will say, "Yeah, yeah, tell me something I don't know."

So no, that's not how I mean it at all.

When I started this blog, I was the only one in the family who had one. I was vaguely famous, in an anonymous, minor league kind of way. Kim and the girls would look at me in wonder - the sort of wonder that said, "I wonder what boneheaded thing he'll say next" or "He wouldn't be stupid enough to put that online, would he?" It wasn't much, but it was mine.

But eventually Tabitha decided she wanted her own platform to tell stories, and since telling stories is something we try to encourage around here we figured it would be okay. It was a bit tricky to set up, given the privacy restrictions that we ended up layering onto her blog (at least for the time being it's strictly reserved for family members, for example), but eventually she was happily blathering along on her own just like her dear old dad.

Recently Kim started one as well. It's fun to read, and you should ask her for the URL. I'm sure she'll give it to you.

And then Lauren felt left out, so she decided she wanted one too. We'd have to layer it with the same sort of restrictions that Tabitha labored under, but since we'd already done that once we figured how hard could it be?

Harder than we figured, it turns out. It became a digital odyssey, fraught with all of the pitfalls of well-meaning security in the digital age.

First, she needed a unique email address. My original plan was to add her to my blogroll, since theoretically I could make infinite blogs here online that way, but this meant that she would be posting as me all the time and that she would not accept. It's bad enough she has to listen to me in meat space. And as you can't open up multiple Blogger accounts with the same email, a unique email address it would have to be.

Ah, I thought. I've got an email address that I do not use - it came with the cable television, many years ago, along with the similarly useful Hallmark Channel. We could use that.

Well, we could if I remembered what it was.

Finding that out took nearly two hours and involved several phone calls, an internet chat session with a help-desk representative who is probably still snickering about me to his buddies, and a deep and abiding need for seriously adult beverages afterward. And that was just step one.

We still had to set up the actual blog.

My initial effort at this ran afoul of the FCC.

One of the steps you have to take when filling out the application here on Blogger is that you need to fill out your age. Lauren insisted that I use her real birthdate. It turns out that even if the blog is, for all practical and legal purposes, mine (everything she writes I approve before it is published), the internet powers that be don't recognize this. And once you make this mistake, it kills your email address forever. I tried entering my birthday, and all I got was the notice that I was too young to blog. Other than Social Security I don't know that I'm too young for anything these days, so it was an honor of sorts, though one I'd just as soon have lived without.

So a new email was needed. And that's where things exceeded my admittedly limited technological capacity.

Fortunately Kim stepped in and took care of it, through a mysterious process that might have been less mysterious had I been in a less cable-company-and-Google-inspired mood and been able to watch without wanting to hurl bricks at random passing cars. That sort of thing opens up vast realms of trouble that I'd prefer not to explore, thank you, and so I let the mystery be.

But now everyone has a blog around here.

All the cool kids are doing it.