I made my first website in the ’90s – a free Tripod site (Geocities was for lame-os who probably had AOL – or in clever ’90s Internet slang, “Geoshitties was for lame-os who probably had AO-Hell”). I can still find pieces of it in the ether if I look hard enough. Back then, if you wanted loud jangly digital music to blare at someone the second they hit your site, and you needed that dancing baby taking up the top third of your page (which definitely had some unreadable font colors), you had to code that shit yourself. So I learned HTML.
Anyway, now I’m old. Years of being misdiagnosed and medicated for various mental illnesses before the level 2 autism diagnosis back in 2020 have caused my frustration tolerance to be low and my executive functioning to be nil. But I have creative work to share, and the time to finally do the blog I’ve always wanted to do. And now with this WordPress thing I don’t have to even think for myself.
I have to say though, I downloaded the Yoast SEO plugin because I thought I needed it. I wrote my first crochet pattern up and was pretty happy with it, but Yoast kept giving me a bad report card. It told me I needed to add certain phrases five times in a post this size and add other phrases to image captions, and I followed all their directions to get the green light.
And then my damn post came across to me like the internet slop where I’m trying to read around 3,000 ads and links to YouTube videos just to get to any helpful written information at all.
I’m removing the Yoast plugin and putting my full voice back in. I don’t talk like a “for Dummies” book and my website doesn’t have to sound like one. I pay for my own domain and I don’t care how high I come up in a search engine. That’s for people who want to monetize, I think, and that’s not me.
