As mentioned elsewhere, I’m a network architect. Lock me in a room with two tons of network hardware and I’ll build you a network. Basically, I make stuff work.

That said, my background is almost entirely networking and hardware. When it comes to programming and HTML/CSS/PHP/XML, I’m about as useful as Albert Einstein, and Albert Einstein is currently dead. So ask me to sit down and crank out some code or a website from scratch and all you’ll get is a blank stare and several requests for beer.

That right there is the reason I didn’t start blogging until 2005: I didn’t think I could do it. Whenever I’d ask someone how to set one up they’d mention PHP, at which point I’d shove my fingers in my ears and yell, “LALALALALALA!” Jags don’t do code.

Then I stumbled onto BlogSpot and figured it couldn’t get any easier than that. As TJW grew in popularity, people kept telling me I should host it myself, and I’d invariably tell them I wasn’t interested because I didn’t want them to know how dumb I am. That’s right about when my brother tossed me into the deep end of the HTML pool.

See, he’d paid someone to create an affiliate site for his business, but didn’t wanna keep paying for updates. Being the tech guy in the family, the task fell to me.

What I learned was that if I have to create a site from scratch, I can’t. I’m sure if I got a couple books and spent some time reading, I could pick it up in short order, but that requires time and actual effort. I don’t have a lot of free time, and I avoid effort at any cost, so I continue to be useless as a web designer.

I can, however, take an existing site and tinker with it until it looks the way I want it to. This takes me hours longer than someone who actually knows what they’re doing, but I do manage to fumble my way into mediocre results (much like teenage sex). With that in mind, why not try and make a really unimpressive-looking blog of my own? (This is an example of setting realistic goals, very much unlike teenage sex.)

I helped a group of friends start their own phpBB forums a little while later, which is where I discovered that fumbling with PHP and CSS is just as easy as fumbling with HTML. This gave me enough ill-advised confidence to launch The JagPot.

On a serious note, it’s definitely worth mentioning that morons like myself would get nowhere in a community like this without all of the wonderful people who create and maintain open source utilities for bloggers and forum admins. More details on this in my FAQ, but suffice it to say for now that I greatly appreciate the tremendous efforts and contributions made by thousands of folks out there who make newbie blogging possible (a special salute to BlogSpot, the WordPress team, FeedBurner, Ping-o-Matic, and iPowerWeb).

Jags