While people always say that you can turn to the Web for help with just about any subject, first you need to know where to go to look.

I was reminded of this lesson last night when something went very wrong with my personal blog and I had thousands of odd characters appearing in my entries.  As I didn’t want to take the time to hand correct thousands of posts, I started looking for help on the Web.

The first thing you always need to do is try to find a troubleshooting guide for whatever it is you’re having problems with.  Barring finding your answer there, as not everything has a troubleshooting guide, then you need tofind a message forum related to the item you are having trouble with.  You can usually do this by going to a search engine and searing on the name of the item and forums.  Say it is a problem with your cat, then you simply enter “cat forum”, or get more specific with terms like “cat health forum”, “cat obedience forum” etc, etc.  If it a product by a specific brand, say a Dell monitor, then you would need to include the brand name in the search as well.

So, you found the forum, what do you do?  First thing you should always do is use the forum’s search feature by looking for terms associated with your situation.  This will always be asked once you post a message, so you might as well get it out of the way.  Once you have done that, if you don’t find any information that seems to correct your problem, then you need to register with the forum and make a post about your problem.  Remember when people reply to always be kind as most of them are doing this for free to help out their fellow man.

I think you will find most forums can fix your problems, but not all.  Also don’t be surprised if you don’t get a reply right away as most forums are run for free, and by volunteers, so there will be times when no one is around to reply.

The other thing you can do is something that is fairly new, and that is to say something to your Twitter followers.  I was amazed at the quick response I got, and one kind Twitter user, @oscargodson, even whipped up some JavaScript coding for me to fix the stray character problem in my posts.  I found a simple and quick solution in the meantime, but I was floored by his generosity of doing such a thing, and I think it also goes to show what a community Twitter is turning in to.

There are always ways to find answers on the Web for the majority of life’s problems, and I am sure we will revisit this topic to give you even more suggestions.