I have written poetry all my life. Mostly to impress girls when I was younger and women when I was older, like courting my wife long distance by mailing letters and poems. Something I believe she missed after we married.

By 1997, I realized I had to get on the Internet. I learned a bit of html, found a template from a local power company, and started posting my poems. By 1999, I didn’t like the template heading and went to a local Internet provider with the html that the template had provided me, acquired a domain, added a suitable header with my 35 Ford coupe rendering and a photograph of me exiting my 1998 Ford Windstar kneeling van with a side ramp that I drove from 1998 to 2006. 

I’ve never been much for searching for websites for my poems, stories, articles, and books that could help me with my writing and publishing – perhaps to my downfall and why I’ve never had a large Internet presence like some others seem to gain so easily. I tended more to help others with their projects and have always done my work from my bootstraps with my computer rather than relying on others online to do things for me like templates and expensive hardware and software to go “professional.”

However, while I was promoting my first novel, a writer’s etiquette no-no, on an early chat line with other authors, I received an email with a document that literally destroyed my email, and I had to start over. But out of that chat room, a fellow from England who was starting up a website with venture capital to publish POD books in paperback, contacted me.  Toby Emden told me that he liked my first novel and would publish it for me. I immediately left the vanity press where they had already dropped me as one of their authors for a lack of ebook sales. The Kaleidoscope Effect sold very well for the first two or three months there and then stopped selling.

Emden had worked for British intelligence and wrote the novel, Ten to Midnight. The book garnered some buzz in the UK. Toby was searching for ways to publish his book when he came 

upon the idea of being a publisher. With his now long defunct publishing company, bookbooters.com, he started gathering authors like me into his fold, publishing our books for us in paperback. At one point, Toby suggested that we all join authorsden.com.

I joined Authors Den in 2002. The site was free and easy to navigate using a set of templates for entering poems, articles, stories, and book summaries. The site was very popular. Some authors were there more for the fellowship than for serious writing. AD predated Facebook and therefore was appealing to authors without any other good way to connect with other authors, like me.

AD began to take in commercials while continuing to give free advertising for books by members. About 2004, memberships were created and charged. I grabbed a lifetime membership that will carry me until 2042. And, if I’m still alive, I will demand to continue free.

Recently, because of both security concerns and the influx of AI, there is a big shake up of all the minor and major websites that is being felt by content producers like authors here on AD and me who just want to upload our work as easily as possible. 

The membership in AD has dwindled in recent years, primarily with the advent of Facebook and so many other places where writers could upload their poems and books. For many, life got in the way, they died, lost their muse or otherwise just couldn’t come to the site anymore with any new work to post.

The management of AD is trying hard to get up to date, more secure and more user-friendly for authors like it has always been. Why some of us continue to stay and upload years on end without concern. But the renovation of the site has caused some glitches. Notifications of messages by authors to other authors, sent by email come out a bit garbled but can be read. For a time, authors who uploaded poems, stories and articles without an image were not listed in those categories. 

That has been corrected. But it is clear that an image, so easily created by AI now, is the way that AD wants us to present our work on the website. Using AI to create work to post appears to also be permitted. But I have only used it for making my bad English better, and nothing more.

More difficult, when I upload my weekly poem now, it pauses, and then it tells me that my posting failed. Only to find out when I refresh my page of my poem uploads, that it’s there and posted. And it will not look good without an image like I’ve always done – recently with AI because it takes so long to find an image, get permission, and then format it for posting with proper credit.

But it isn’t Authors Den that I’m writing about. It’s Microsoft Office 365. I first used word processing in 1971 using WYLBUR, developed at Stanford in 1966-67 on their prototype IBM 360 65 time shared computer when I was a student there. At West Virginia University for 100 pages of data statements for my dissertation printed on a high-speed printer, and then later, at Atlanta University using their word processing Atlanta Scientific CRT typewriter with printer attached, I was surprised in 1987 when Apple gave Texas Southern University, where I worked, a few McIntosh SEs.

The computer center director gave me one to try out. When I started to tinker with it, I discovered floppy disks that weren’t floppy with programs on them. There was a word processor called Microsoft Word, and another one called Microsoft Excel. Word was just what I needed to type my own memos, letters, articles, reports and plans. I could do away with using secretaries that were often too slow and getting my work typed and sent.

When I tried Excel, I found that it did charts, graphs and all the things that I used in my teaching engineering and statistics courses and office to display information and data in very readable and useful ways. 

And they were compatible! I could paste information from Excel into Word. I was hooked. Shortly after, I got copy of Microsoft PowerPoint from a fellow faculty friend. After fiddling with it for a couple of hours, I figured out how it worked and was immediately creating and printing fantastic transparency presentations on overhead projectors.

There came a time when Microsoft quit upgrading and selling their software through Apple. I would periodically buy an Office suite but found that many of the upgrades weren’t very useful and only made the applications (Apple’s word for computer programs or routines/algorithms – recently shortened to apps) overly complex and more cumbersome to use. But there were some shortcut Icons for doing more complex actions that were introduced that worked better. Still, doing something like formatting a book for publishing, could be quite difficult for the average author. I haven’t tried, but AI can probably do it in seconds now.

Over the years I got quite good at using both Word and Excel and produced some stellar PowerPoint presentations including animated ones. It was only when I started using Voice on my iMacs and the recent upgrades of Office 365 that I started experiencing problems.

Except for a few Java script routines that I have pasted into the html code in my website, it has always been completely formatted in text (.txt). I used Microsoft Word in the text format to create my poem pages every week. About two years ago, I found that apostrophes (‘) and quote marks (“) were being automatically made “curly” instead of the vertical marks in the print and typewriter versions of the past. When I changed my text file pages into html files, simply by changing the file format to .htm like I always did, any contractions or quoted sections in my poems opened on the Internet with strange symbols replacing the apostrophes and quote marks.

To counter, I’ve had to change contractions to the whole words. For example, don’t to do not. And removed the quotes and used something else to highlight the quoted words, like italics. Fortunately, when I upload to AD the same poem, I don’t have any of these difficulties. The old WYSIWYG applies, and I see the poem the way that it was originally written in text.

I did a search to see if there were html code for these forced curly symbols and there are. I will try to use them when I upload my next poem to my website. However, that will require me copying the code and replacing the symbol with that code to get it looking right on my webpages. Instead of making things easier for me, Microsoft Word has made it harder.

Recently, I updated my operating system for both of my iMacs. I also renewed my Office 365 subscription with Microsoft. When I open any document in Microsoft Word, it appears in a very huge text format that I must reduce to 3 pt. to make it readable. I have checked the preferences and there doesn’t seem to be a way for me to make Microsoft Word open documents in a font format that I like. When I call and talk to real people at Microsoft, they don’t have a clue. My second iMac opens Microsoft Word document normally, so the problem may be a software glitch on my computer that the updates have either created or not removed.

I always stick to things that work and don’t like it when, like I was when I worked for other people, being forced to throw out something that worked very well and take on something new that didn’t work very well. Why I haven’t changed my way of making my website. Even though I get offers almost daily to improve my website so that it looks flashy, has a high likely of being found in searches with a higher ranking (SEO), and helps me sell my products. In other words, a lot more pages and ads before the searcher finds what they are looking for. I’m sure that website developers get paid more for more pages developed, even if they are not content but just ways to delay getting to content with ads.

I’ve never sold books from my website or anything else. Have made it free and easily accessible without any need for membership or passwords. I even have my email address there for anyone to use rather than the typical information form so many authors have on their sites with their books displayed in a very flashy fashion that doesn’t make them any more readable or sellable. You can reach content from my link heavy homepage with either one or two clicks and no annoying pop-up ads.

I hope I haven’t bored you, but I finally have concluded. The equivalent of Notepad on pcs on the Apple computers is TextEdit. Because it works well with Voice, I dictate almost everything, including this article, first on TextEdit before copying it to Word to do spelling and grammar checks with Editor. And then on to any other application or site I am intending to use the writing in, like an AD template. 

I was very late to come to this conclusion. From now on, I will not use Microsoft Word to develop my webpages but stick with TextEdit and avoid all the difficulty that the Microsoft monster continues to throw at me like a Companion or Copilot to write my poetry, stories, articles or even books for me. Now, isn’t that sweet? Not! As far as getting back on the right track… Better late than never.

Copyright 2025 © Ronald W. Hull

8/18/25