It appears that the company that provides the template for my website has been unable to keep up with the relentless updates made by Firefox and Explorer. Everything still works except one of the most critical pieces–the “table” format I use for the horse portrait page. I can’t add columns to my rows anymore, so I’m effectively unable to update the site in its current form. They have no plans to fix the problem. I have the single option of cancelling the service, they say. And I thought we lived in the “Age of Choice”!!
Which led me to take the unprecedented step of attempting to learn Joomla (www.joomla.org) which is an open-source website builder which touts itself as user-friendly to both beginners and experts. Hah! So far, I’ve been inundated with all kinds of geeky terms which are not explained unless you go to a lot of effort to look them up. I’ve spent hours reading (and printing out) all of the hands-on instruction pages. And more hours downloading the (fortunately free) software I need to play around with creating a sample site on my own computer; then installing it, following incomplete instructions that made me spend more time searching their handy-dandy online forum for answers.
The first few go-rounds of learning anything new are tough, so I’m just going to get my whining out of the way now and see how I feel about it in the next few weeks. I do suspect, however, that this project of completely rebuilding my website could take well into next year…
Alli Farkas Artist Adventures 
That sucks. 😦 The one thing I really hate about WordPress is how hard it is to make working tables; I know HTML very well and did web design as a job for years and years, but there are just some things that certain systems won’t let you do, and it’s definitely frustrating trying to figure out what the limitations are. Equally frustrating trying to keep up with the new technologies and changes to them, too… I’m starting to see why folks older than me often just don’t even feel it’s worth it to try. I haven’t really used Joomla more than passingly, but I wish you luck with it!
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It always nice to have a fellow traveler who can appreciate my ire and frustration at modern technology. Change used to be good, but now it’s more like change for the sake of change…just because they can. I’m a lot farther along in this project than I was two weeks ago, but still miles and miles from the finish line…it also doesn’t help that the tutorials are often written incorrectly or incompletely. I’m getting used to expecting to have to research on the forums when something doesn’t work. Perversely, it’s kind of comforting in the middle of my confusion to find out that it wasn’t my fault after all.
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