thedanglingmodifier.co.uk

I’m beginning to think it’s not the language. It’s me. I am stupid.

There are certain simple things I want to do on this blog. I want to make the comments section bigger, so that more of my readers can tell me I’m wrong. I want people to be able to subscribe for e-alerts or something, to let them know when the dangling modifier is updated. I want to do things that keep people coming back. I want to rule the so-called ‘blogosphere’.

But what happens when I try to do these things? I find myself floating around in cyberspace, that’s what.

Not floating in that nice spacy way you get in dreams, where you drift along on the clouds until you want to come back down to earth. Where you float through the windows of someone’s house. No, this is the horrible uncontrolled floating where you bang into things and hurt yourself.

So, if I put ‘comment box’ into the search box on WordPress I get:

“cforms II is the most customizable, flexible & powerful ajax supporting contact form plugin”

And further down the page, another ‘plug-in’:

“AJAXed Wordpress (aWP) is an extremely powerful plugin that harnesses the power of AJAX and Wordpress to improve the user experience.”

Amazing! Or so I think until I realise that they don’t mean the household cleaner. These words are slicing through my mind, scratching on my brain like skates on ice.

What can I do? I’m so confused I end up having to turn to geeks. They smile knowingly, push their glasses up their noses and grin. I have asked several for help – I don’t want to wear any friendships too thin – and there is a moment with all of them where I can see they are enjoying the power, the knowledge that they can help, that I am at their mercy.

Of course I resent that. What self-respecting confused person wouldn’t resent that? By not knowing this stuff, by not being able to follow descriptions like:

“Increases Wordpress’ default search functionality through an options panel”

I am giving them the opportunity to smirk, call me names – names I’ve never come across before, like ‘blog tart’.

One of them even tells me I don’t need e-alerts, because there’s an RSS feed on my blog. I’m supposed to know about this web 2.0 malarkey, so I pretend to understand and slink off to see if I can get that working by myself.

Another one says something about folksonomy. Folksonomy? What sort of a word is that? Hippies, guitars, bandannas and beach fires spring to mind. Come on every body and sing. And when I ask what that is, he says:

“You should know. You bloggers invented it.”

Me! Me? I would never invent a word like that. Never. But I don’t show my dismay. Instead I scuttle off to find out what it means.

Thank God for wikipedia – at least I know what a wiki is. It turns out that ‘folksonomy’:

“describes the bottom-up classification systems that emerge from social tagging”.

So there we are then.