A Giant Notice Board

My grandfather, who turns 90 this year, just called me to ask how to “get a blog on his computer”. Some friends of his are travelling and have set up a blog, and he wanted to see it. I guess he had the idea that you had to set something up on the computer, and that it would be complicated, I guess because that’s true of a lot of things on a computer.

I described wordpress.com as a giant notice board, and the name of the blog (the “blogname” from “blogname.wordpress.com”) as the part of the board with the photos from your friends, and this seemed to make sense. When I said that you just need to type in the address in your web browser (the colourful circle down the bottom that I put there for him) he realised that he could do that no problem.

I then mentioned bookmarks, which may or may not be too much extra to bother with when computers are so foreign to your way of thinking. I suppose if he can see the photos from his friends, then I can call this a win for the web.

The only point to this story, if there is one, is me remembering that a lot of time and learning has gone into what I know about this digital electronic world, and not everyone has the same level of knowledge. It’s useful to remember this when creating parts of this world!