Report From the President of Horrendous Treatment of Most Links (HTML) Annonymous

Who needs Belladonna when you've got "Grand Rounds"?

Trust me, I had functional GI spasm.

And functional cerebral spasms, functional throat spasms, functional tear duct spasms, functional screaming spasms, non-functional (thank god) waves of nausea and acute diaphoresis that would have made a cardiologist blanch.

I think I have some hair left.

I even invented some new four-letter-words!

Nothing like hosting Grand Rounds to bring out your inner creativity.

But I figured it this way: would a nurse walk out on a patient just because they were going bad? Of course not.

So I pulled a double shift!

I'd like to offer some advice for future hosts of Grand Rounds that I learned the hardest way possible.

• DO NOT TRUST BLOGGER or whoever you use to produce your web page/blog.
  

• Write the entire post using a web word processor and then post it to the blog.
  

• Our colleague at Clinical Cases and Images-Blog suggests using Writely - The Web Word Processor . For when it absolutely, positively has to be posted correctly.
  

• The following does not constitute backing up

• Saving your html to a folder on your "desktop". I thought I had backed up. All it did was "translate" the html into a wierd version of the Blogger posting page.

• Saving a copy of the actual submission in a folder on the desktop. Nice, but didn't do me a bit of good because once you save it, the web address is altered.

• Saving as a draft as you go along means nothing if Firefox crashes. Which it did, exactly five seconds after I had finished rebuilding the post the first time.
  

• Save all emails with the submissions in them. Thank god I did this. I would have been helpless without them.

• When I posted all links were functional. Once posted, I went to fix a bad link, and the repost showed that the bottom third of the links had ceased to be links. I then took the entire post offline thinking it would be easier to work on before more people saw the broken version. I think that was where the first mistake was made. But I'm not sure why. Once it is up, leave it up and work on it while it is posted.
  

• Do not bullet your links. I had a submission with multiple links and I put them in a bullet format. It wasn't until I put them in as links in the narrative that I was able to make links of the submissions below.

• Even though Grand Rounds is officially on Tuesday, have it ready and post it on Monday night so if it turns into a disaster you have time to fix it. Thank god I posted it at 1701, one minute after the deadline (I was excited to see it!). Had I discovered it any later than that, there would have been no time to have something on Tuesday morning.

I am as compulsive about my blog as I am with my charting, and the original Grand Rounds had every link in red, italicized and underlined. The colors you see on it now, I had nothing to do with any of them. All I wanted by that time was just a functional link.

How do you explain to your husband that there are approximately 60 professionals/patients from around the world who are depending on you to get their stories out and you can't let them down? He wonders why I have such a stressful hobby. Doesn't have a clue. Only a blogger would understand.

I was so excited to be hosting and I wanted everything to be perfect. I had planned the theme weeks in advance, so this has felt like a major failure. Ironically, I get my first Instalanche and it is bittersweet.

Thanks to everyone who sent their support. I owe a few of you some linkage, will put it in the next post. Won't be Grand Rounds, but I'll send folks your way.

Now, no more downer stuff!

I want to thank Rita over at the MSSPNexus Blog who made me laugh at loud with this photo she enclosed in an email.

I get all my stuff off the internet, people are always asking me where I find it, but this one definitely came from her.

Thanks, Rita, I definitely needed that!

Oh, and by the way, are you wondering if I would host Grand Rounds again?

If given the chance?

In a heartbeat.