So last fall my students did this cool scavenger hunt, and I posted pictures of their marvelous results on my blog. I sent the link to my fellow chemistry colleagues thinking they would appreciate the Group Theory findings.
The next semester we were discussing updating our departmental website, and had a person come over from marketing to tell us what they can do (and what we want them to do for us). We were informed that someone from our department would need to be the "webmaster" and do all the updating on the website. One of the chemistry profs spoke up, "Amanda keeps a blog...she probably would know how to do this." If you have ever done any "webmastering", you probably are laughing right now. If not, like the rest of us, you're probably thinking what we were thinking, "How hard can it be?"
So I meant with our contact person to find out what I need to do to get started. I went to IT to get the program downloaded onto my computer and was told, "It's a very easy program - you'll be able to figure it out."
Uh, that was in the spring. Classes got busy. I got pregnant and sick. And now it is August and up until a few days ago, I couldn't even get the program started. Much less actually use it. It wasn't "an easy program" - at least not for a non-webmaster like myself. To illustrate how "tech-unsavy" I am, my ITouch was set to the year 2000 for a few days. Every time I needed to see my calendar, I had to scroll through 9 years of calendars. Yes, I figured out yesterday how to fix that. (And I think I found the culprit-Casen. My Word program on my computer today was set to some weird background.)
After a desperate email I sent to our marketing contact person, I got assigned to a real webmaster that taught me how to use the program (and actually start the program!). It wasn't too bad once I knew what to do. Then I ran into cosmetic issues - how do I make cool bullet points and links? So I sent another desperate email and got the poor person to come to my office to show me. I told her about how I got the job as "department webmaster". I felt better when she told me, "Yeah, this isn't an intuitive program that you can just figure things out. You have to kinda be in this field to get it."
Ah, so nice to hear.
The moral of the story? Be careful who you tell you blog to. Oh, and also, desperate emails go a long way in getting some help!
1 comment:
A lesson learned, well several actually. Somethings are best kept to yourself - I learned that lesson the hard way too! Glad you figured out things.
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