Learning how to develop this blog has been – and is – great fun. Discovering anything new has always made my brain feel good.

As most of us know, if you want Internet-related help these days, you ask somebody younger. In developing this blog, my help has come from a son, a son-in-law and virtual blogging mentors. I have been amazed at the amount of free instruction they make available to anyone who wants to learn.

So, appropriately, I want to express my appreciation to:

• My Number Two Son, who advised me long ago to use WordPress, patiently answers my technical questions – all the way from Bangkok – and has never made me feel like it was too difficult for me to learn.
• Favorite Son-in-Law (graphic designer in Nashville) who customized the photo in the header. (The photo, by the way is from PD Photo.org.)

Then there are Daniel, Seth, Gideon and Lori, who all live somewhere on the Internet.

• I’ve been receiving updates from Daniel Scocco at Daily Blog Tips for months now. I don’t always understand the material he covers, but little by little, the vocabulary is becoming familiar. Through Daily Blog Tips, I met…

• Seth Waite, of  Blogging Agenda, whose “How to Start a Blog” series is just what I was looking for: a step-by-step, day-by-day guide to professional blogging.

• Through Seth I discovered Gideon Shalwick at Become a Blogger, whose video tutorials provided the technical instructions I needed to launch the blog, using WordPress as a publishing platform and design source; Name Cheap for domain name registration; Host Gator as a web host; and FileZilla for FTP software. If you need to learn what all this means, link to their sites. They’ll tell you.

While these guys provided technical know-how, without realizing it,

• Writer Lori Widmer and her 2^nd Annual Writers Worth Day motivated me to stop doing what I dreaded every day: Bidding for writing, editing, and proofreading jobs on an impersonal, competitive, I-win-at-your-expense internet job board. When I discovered her network of supportive, professional, self-respecting writers, I knew it’s where I wanted to be.

Thank you, my young mentors.

Let’s talk about it. I know we all learn from our young children – especially that patience thing. What have you learned from younger adults?