My blog was actually an online journal. And everyone knows that unless you are a celebrity, no one is interested in whether or not you have brushed your teeth!

Learning from mistakes.

As all my readers know, I’ve been blogging for a while – a long, long while. Ten years or maybe even more. Like many bloggers, I’m a self-taught blogger and made many mistakes. As a matter of fact, I still make mistakes. And with every learning, I’ve written about it in the hope that others won’t make the same. 

But, I still to make mistakes – new ones.

However, this doesn’t really faze me because I firmly believe that one only learns through mistakes.

For instance, after my last post, I realised that my WP version needed to be updated. This was after I discovered that my NEW  media files weren’t being uploaded onto my posts.

At first, I thought it was a phone issue so I went through the hoops with Apple.

But it turned out it was a WP issue. So I did the obvious and turned to Jetpack.

It seems that since my blog is self-hosted, only my hosting provider could help me.

But SiteGround, my hosting provider told me that I had exceeded my 20GB server space and needed to delete some files in order to update WP to the latest version.

Now, this has to be done manually.

Nothing can be scarier than this to a person who is a self-taught computer geek.

I am not only technophobic but forgetful to boot. I simply can’t remember what the steps actually are. Working with two open screens is something I am not comfortable with and since Dummies for Dummies no longer exists, I am stumped.

Honestly, I am scared to follow the steps suggested in the link forwarded by Jetpack because I stand to lose the entire content if I press the wrong button.

I am, therefore, going through each and every blog post and trashing the irrelevant ones.

I don’t know if this will work but this was my Eureka moment! Finally, I have an insight as to why my blog was languishing in terms of visitors and views.

So perhaps my # WOTY: REFRESH is turning out to be more prophetic after all!

By the time I finish this exercise, I will have completely refreshed not only my blog but my approach to blogging itself. I will finally have understood what the gurus have been saying all along

• Find a niche
• Generate relevant content
• Ensure that every post has a takeaway

So my  6 takeaways from this post are

• Learning is a lifelong process
• If you can’t learn from a manual, be prepared to learn from your mistakes
• Everything does work out for the best
• Choose carefully while choosing a blogging platform
• Don’t go self-hosted unless you are really tech savvy
• Always ensure that your blog host and service provider are one and the same.

Are you one of those bloggers who bumble through the blogosphere? Are any of you out there able to help me with how to tackle this?

Waiting to sort things out,

Ciao