AARRRRRRRRRGHHHHHH!

OK. I consider myself fairly technically literate. OK, very literate. So imagine my surprise when it tok 2 and a half hours to complete the RSS tasks. Listened to the podcast, watched the tutorials, no problem. Signed up for a bloglines account, no problem. Located lots of blogs, including the assigned ones and several staff blogs, no problem. Then came the part about the public blog and blogrolls. You mean blog!#$$^*%G&*%^$^&% ( Don't know why this wanted to turn that garbled mess into a link???) First, the screenshot wasn't there that explained the step. It wasn't clear once I generated the script where to put it. After an hour of messing with it, I saw that there was a new BETA version of blogger. I found this by going through blogger help and Googling for bloggroll help. My very talented co-worker (OK she is on my staff and she is finished and I will probably be the last of my department to finish oh the shame but at least she knew what she was doing) said that she had switched to the beta and that it was indeed easier to "add elements" which is what adding a bloggroll is. So I switched my blog to the beta, which meant signing up for a Google account. Fine. Well the "Add Page Elements" option was not there. She even pulled up her page to show me what it should look like, but mine wasn't there. Something got lost in the translation between the regular and Beta. So, I logged off and on again, and Voila!!!! it was there! Surely my problems were over. I found the right place, added the script, and........ No feeds. I hadn't shared my profile. Huh???? So I had to figure out on which of the many screens of options on bloglines did I tell it to share. I found it. Refreshed the blog and ....it only displayed three of my 15 feeds. After a lot of looking and detective work, I realized that I actually had set up a bloglines account previously, and it was pulling those feeds. Another hour (over 2 different days) I finally fixed it all. Of course, I couldn't just delete the one bloglines account, so I had to change info and profile names, and keep updating the script element in Beta Blogger. Well, it is real purty now. Of course, I haven't had time to read all my feeds, because I have been getting this to work. My public blogroll is http://www.bloglines.com/public/vintageradiance

To end this rant, I need to comment that if I got this frustrated, it could be bad enough for others to give up. And they are exactly the ones that this wonderful program is meant for, to show them that these cool tools are not something to be afraid of, but discovered and used. I love this program. I think it is great that it is discovery based. I also think it is great how we are encouraged to utilize fellow staff to troubleshoot. However, I believe that certain things should have a little more guidance. For me it was blogrolls, but others have had trouble with other things that simply didn't work the way they were supposed to. This is basically hindsight now, but identifying after this is over what were problem areas for staff and adding "cheat sheets" for especially tough areas (or troubleshooting tips) would benefit those looking at modeling programs after Learning 2.0. This is not a criticism, simply an opinion on my experience, and the hope that this is as wonderful a discovery experience for everyone as possible. Of course, you can always chalk it all up to operator error, and leave it at that. I personally will keep plugging away, I am truly enjoying understanding all of the 23 things.