The art of signing up for Blogspot

Tonight, on a whim, I decided to become a blogger. This is the third major commitment I've made this week, though by far the least ambitious. On Monday I decided to train for a half-marathon, after finishing a witty if somewhat irreverent book about a couch-potato-turned-athlete. I felt inspired. Then on Tuesday I stumbled upon some investing websites and decided that I ought to study up on the subject and become an expert, after which I plan to invest $500 and yield a cool million before turning 30. And now this. Blogging. The art of writing whatever I want online so that you fine people can read it.

Becoming a blogger was actually a harder than I expected. To sign up, Blogspot makes you type in the usual: blog title, password, e-mail, etc. All that is pretty simple. But then it employs a ridiculously-difficult captcha. A captcha, for those of you who don't know (and I had to look it up), is that set of random letters or numbers that you have to type in on sign-up pages so the Blogspot people know that you're not actually an animatronic robot trying to spam them. So if you read Fg56uMmK in fancy pink cursive and then type Fg56uMmK in boring Times New Roman they let you create a blog. But Blogspot's captchas are different. Instead of using italics or fancy font or whatever they have chosen to smush all the letters together into one jumbled mess so that you're left guessing as to what the correct password is. Is that an l? An I? There's no way to tell! Blogspot's captchas are so successful at preventing spam that they are able to effectively ward off humans too. I tried twice before clicking on the little wheel chair icon next to the text box, an aid for visually-impaired bloggers that enables them to listen to said captcha rather than reading it. But that was no help. It was a piecemeal of sounds and syllables all garbed together. It reminded me of what old sci-fi films might have used to represent the aliens broadcasting to Americans over radio airwaves.

Then, finally, success! SuImpESse. That was the magic code. It took me three or four times of refreshing until I got a captcha code that was remotely legible. S's are harded to smush, I guess. And with the successful captcha code came the successful creation of a new blog; one of millions, I'm told. It's titled Shiver Now, after a phrase in a poem by A.E. Houseman and the title of a web page I owned for a very brief stint as an html editor during high school. My husband will probably laugh when he reads that and I'm glad because I'd like to think that I'm amusing somebody.

So now, with the click of a button, I will fulfill my third resolution and become a blogger. Y'all are in for a treat.