I’m not a control freak. I’m not. Ask anyone. I’m so laissez faire you’d think I just don’t give a damn.
Until things go wrong. Or just aren’t quite good enough. Or flexible enough.
I can tell you the first time I used open source. I was typing something for work, and every time I typed “7th” into my document, WordPerfect (or Word, or whatever the hell it was) would try to make the “th” superscript, and then it would fold up and sink into the mud. The fourth time it caught fire, folded up, and sank into the mud. It took me that many tries to see what it was failing to do when it crashed (I type fast). Three times more I tried and every time, sooner or later, I’d forget and type the “th” after a number, and it would crash again.
Furious, I went to Google and typed something like, “where can I get a word processor that isn’t Microsoft?”
The heavens opened. A trio of angels played a crashing crescendo on neon Stratocasters. Openoffice.org appeared on my screen.
The changes came fast after that. Paint.net. Firefox. Thunderbird. When people complained that nothing Microsoft worked in Vista–I could laugh, because I wasn’t running anything Microsoft.
All in all, it’s not really surprising that I went to WordPress. (Actually, it was a necessity. Maybe what I mean is that it’s no surprise I took to it.)Â It’s so versatile. So powerful. So…secret knowledge-y.
WordPress is a magical community, let me tell you. If you don’t know the lingo, you won’t get far. You have to be able to do certain things, or the others won’t even look at you. But if you can win entree into that group…the wizards are amazing. Anything you want to do, there’s probably a plug-in already. Or you can make a suggestion, and they’ll be racing each other to see who makes it work first.
Joomla! is brilliant, for the record, as well as easy. And I can’t wait to get my own wiki up and working.
Will I go to Linux? Oh, probably sooner or later.
So what does all this mean? I have no idea. I started this post and forgot to finish it, and now I forget where I was going. Except it probably would have been something about why I decided to self-publish. But does that really matter? Try the book. That’s all.