Over the years I’ve taken a quiet satisfaction in my ability to figure out some of the backend stuff on my websites. I thought I’d moved from geek wannabe to at least geek manqué.

But I have to admit defeat. I’m working on a project now that uses the wonderful CivicSpace open source community platform. But to run the aggregator within the site, I need to set up a crontab on our server. So Dreamhost, our ISP, helpfully pointed me to an article on SSH and crontab. But I defy any mere mortal to understand the first thing about using PuTTY. I’m totally at sea here.

Why can’t there be a helpful radio button on the Dreamhost panel (at every other turn over the last few years, Dreamhost has been a great champion of simplification)? Or is that the kind of dumb remark that only a hopeless newbie would make?