Let me begin with a brief explanation for my interest in Alexander Von Humboldt and things related to him.
I recently read a book by Andrea Wulf entitled: Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self. Von Humboldt was not the focus of the book, but Wulf talked enough about him to make me want to know more. I had heard of Humboldt before, but I had not realized what a powerful and influential thinker he was. This both surprised and humbled me because I thought I knew at least something about the great thinkers, scientists, and literary figures of that era. So I realized I had to quickly fill in this knowledge void and I immediately started reading books by and about Humboldt. It has been an enlightening and rewarding voyage and it was partly the result of this intellectual journey that made me want to create my own website to give me a place to record my thoughts on the state of the world.
In my first post I also want to make something of a disclaimer by saying simply that the only reason I created this site is to provide a place for me to express my thoughts. I have no intention of trying to sell or advertise products. I am not going to be promoting any kind of business or service. I am not going to be actively seeking followers or subscribers. I have no commercial intentions whatsoever. I simply present this blog as a site people might stumble across in their endless journey through the myriad way stations of the Internet. I offer it as a place to pause for a moment to simply think about things —
nothing else.
To try and achieve this vision I wanted to create a very simple site — one without clutter or confusion. But creating this simple design proved to be much more challenging than I had anticipated. I have been using PCs since they first came into existence and have used many kinds of software and I thought I could figure out WordPress, especially since they promised in their advertising that I could get a website up and running within minutes. It was supposed to be that easy, but it was far from it. I found WordPress to be anything but intuitive. Unless you were already familiar with the vocabulary, techniques, and practice of setting up websites, it was, for me, as confusing as trying to read hieroglyphs.
Now they do offer you an AI assistant that promises to help you get a site up in minutes, and a variety of templates to choose from that they say you can customize to your preferences, but they were all focused on setting up commercially oriented sites and I failed in all attempts to simplify them.
I tried following some YouTube tutorials, but again I couldn’t make the changes to the sites they were teaching to help me get to where I wanted. I would get hopelessly messed up and as I could never figure out how to undo the mess, I had to continually ask my service provider to reset my site so I could start from zero again. After the third time, they showed my how I could do this for myself, which was one of the best bits of help they gave me because I had to start from zero quite a few more times before I finally began to “somewhat” understand the software and how to use it.
I simply wanted simple and that was proving very elusive to achieve. However, my mounting frustration made me even more determined to get what I wanted and finally I stumbled across a video that I could follow well enough to get started. There are still many, many things I don’t understand, but now that I’m started, and have figured out “simple”, I may slowly be able to go from beginner to competent user. I may even learn how to add a few bells and whistles to the site — who knows. Anyway, I feel a certain sense of accomplishment at getting this far. As the saying goes — even a thousand mile journey begins with a first step.