Tag Archives: The Land of Blog

I Wish I Were Able to Write All Day Everyday

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WordPress Weekly Writing Challenge (these are really pretty cool!)

I love these weekly challenges, they keep me focused on maintaining my blog and stretching my writing muscles. Even amidst the craziness of the NaNo Wrimo I thought it would be great to just take a break and wax poetic which is exactly what this challenge allows me to do. Seriously guys, I wish I could just sit here and write all day every day. I am soooooooooooo envious of those who blog for a living although I don’t envy the flaming that goes on because people think they can hide behind anonymity, WTH?

I really don’t understand all this focus on negativity in general though. I mean think about it, here’s someone going out on a limb and having the guts to put their personal opinion out there for the world to see and there are more people who are hell-bent and furious on cutting them down to size than giving them kudos and praise. Honestly, I just don’t get it. If you don’t like something fine, don’t read it. But to take the time and effort to read it through in detail in order to cut it down to size, well that exhibits a special kind of hopelessness buried just beneath their comment. Personally, I find said “commentary” a great source of amusement and will never delete any derogatory comment that someone may post regarding my writing. It’s a wonderful way to deal with these cretins.

As for me, one of my favourite uplifting things to do is random acts of kindness. I’m also a big fan of handing out compliments, seeing people smile makes me happy. I am thankful and appreciate those around me and people in general (well except for the jerks). Errrummm I have not quite learned to extend this attitude fully when bike riding so I will have to stipulate an exception here so far as cycling goes. I am likely to lash out in that instance. However, form the most part I am courteous and friendly and patient. If I do resort to yelling now I am instructive, my biggest one being ‘use your signal light’, I also particularly like ‘would it kill you to look in your rearview mirror’. I try not to swear (please note I said try). ‘Really’ said in an extremely sarcastic tone has also helped a lot in the recent past – but I digress.

As I said in my post earlier this week I have written since the age of eleven. All I ever wanted to do was write. For me writing is a life force. If for some reason I could no longer write I think I would shrivel up into a shell of my former self. There have been times when my writing trickled off or became virtually non-existent. I realize now that I have begun this adventure and stretched my writing muscles, how atrophied I had become and how much it had hurt me emotionally. Without knowing exactly why, I have felt deeply unhappy for a long time and in retrospect now I know it was in large part due to this. I’d been repressing my essence, that which is most me. So thank you WordPress and thank you NaNo Wrimo and most of all thanks to myself for finally taking my finger out of my a** and doing that which I love most.


Addendum, this was originally written a few weeks ago – 60 hours has come and gone some 200 hours ago.

Okay so I’ve put about 60 plus hours of research and asking people in the know about starting a blog. A lot of people say just start a blog and flounder from there but what I’m realizing while doing this research (and not putting it on my blog just yet) is a little patience will probably go a long way (oh and a little expense). The old adage, ‘you can’t get something for nothing’ seems very real in the cyber world.

I did not adhere to any of the bracketed information below, in fact I’m still floundering along while being “live”. What I realized after all is that let’s face it, if you don’t know what you’re doing, no one’s really paying attention at the beginning anyway, and your friends are understanding and forgiving (and hopefully sometimes amused by your blunders) so it’s as good a place as any to get your feet wet. I’m still not sure about how I feel regarding advertisement. I may end up setting up two blogs and seeing which one fares better. But I am definitely going to be picking some brains before I figure it out. Be sure to reach out to friends and family when rooting around in the blogasphere, you’d be surprised how many people would like to help. I did get a domain, that seemed very important to me.

[So after several weeks research, here’s my conclusions:

Don’t “go live” until you’re absolutely sure that you have all your ducks in a row. For me this means, getting a domain name, getting a website set up with a correct way to set up banners and ads and a hit counter. Make sure your links are maintained and first and foremost make sure you proofread and spell check your stuff.]

I will repeat the above again and again because I found whenever I went to a site if it was sprinkled with bad grammar and spelling I immediately closed out and found their site of no value. How can their advice be credible when they can’t even spell check before they post? (Okay, crappy grammar, not such an issue for certain things but would it kill people to use a little punctuation from time to time?)

However, I also use slang, “isms”, popular acronyms and so forth as well which is often discouraged – it’s a personal choice. I like to think my audience, while blog uneducated like myself, is otherwise smart and sophisticated. I read something yesterday that really appealed to me wherein the blogger said, write for you and that’s what I’m doing, writing what I’d like to read, what amuses me, what I’m interested in.

Plus, in case you haven’t noticed, people today have the attention spans of fleas. Paragraphs should be short, concise and pertinent. If I was reading a blog, even a well written one and it tended to go on, I’d lose interest, skim through it or close out altogether.

Very few will read pages and pages of information. This is in fact one of my longer entries as I’ve found the blogs I liked were the ones that were short and sweet, oh and a sense of humour never killed anyone either. Gawd you would think all these bloggers were friggin’ teetotalers (that’s straight-edge and boring for you kids) from the way they write. Did no one here remember how boooooooooring those teachers were in school that just droned on and on?!

So What is a Blog?

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Blog

The above gives 27 different interpretations of what is a blog.

However, I disagree vehemently that a blog is a journal, there are specific sites for that. If you just want to wax poetic about life there’s livejournal or Penzu or dailydiary or whatever. To me the idea of a blog is to create and maintain a readership, a flow of traffic and with any luck, an income! In order to do that you have to be dispelling a certain amount of information that people might be looking for, say how to create a blog, or where to go to buy the best suitcase, etc. I hardly expect anyone to read my daily ramblings about how my knee is out, my boyfriend and I are fighting and my cat puked again. (Okay, I tricked you there, but I swear it’s the last time. 🙂 (And I might be a bit hypocritical in that capacity as my rants are slightly in the same vein, however …)

Having said that, there’s nothing stopping you from journal blogging, but I suspect if you want feedback about stuff you’re writing about you want to seek out a community of like-minded individuals that actually give a shit about what you’re writing about in order to get said feedback. It’s really important to remember that there’s so much information out there people are going to focus on what interests them. [If you’re curious, peruse the WordPress site and see how many “journal” like blogs you can find. I’ve already looked and the answer’s not many. This is not the medium for it. If I had the time and the inclination I would probably do both, but for now, my focus is on blogging and the disseminating of (what I hope is) interesting information. But listen, if you guys keep reading and make me popular maybe I can give up the ol’ 9-5 ball and chain and keep a journal blog too … and write that screenplay … and that book. Yeah, yeah whatever GG *snickers*.

Are You Sure This is Where You Should Be? (Remember you can always set up a blog privately and delete it if you like – the world is your oyster!)

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Preliminary Advice for someone new to computer land as well as blog land:

Before you start anything, make sure you know about your search engine’s capacity, how to clear your browser and delete your cookies (or that you’ve scheduled clearing on a regular basis, I have mine set up to clear every time I shut down the internet). Make sure internet access is current and up-to-date. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, speak to your internet provider. Make sure you have good anti-virus software and that you have password protected as much of your stuff as you can; this would include, access to the computer itself, all of your email accounts, access to your wi-fi (if you’re using it), etc. If you’re not sure, do research, this is a buyer beware market. Keep your passwords in a safe place and don’t write them on the back of things. Make sure you have pop-up blockers and honestly, if you want to watch porn – buy it! It’ll cost you less in the long run and p.s. it’s so much easier to hide DVDs than your browser history, trust me! (But be advised you may need to disengage some of your pop-up blockers and change certain settings in order to load certain programs and files. Getting to know when and how to do this takes time. Be patient.)

Make sure you have a good computer (or a lot of patience); your memory capacity, internet access and internal hard drive all affect the loading time of web pages, how many you can load, etc. if your computer is too old it may not even be able to load and run your internet access properly.

Again, most people may think this is stating the obvious but I think it’s so mean how people talk on the internet like you’re already supposed to know all this stuff automatically. How’s that supposed to happen if no one tells you? I don’t think many people consider how overwhelming the internet might be to a newb and why it’s so hard for people who aren’t computer savvy to get interested. Sure you can find all the information after researching for a billion hours. Like who automatically knows that if your pages aren’t loading properly it’s probably just a matter of clearing your cache or deleting your cookies and highly unlikely that you need to call tech support? But most people who are on the net have known this for a long time and therefore assume you should too.

*****

If you are comfortable with all of the above and feel comfortable in the land of the world-wide web then perhaps you are ready to consider blogging. Now I’m looking at blogging in hopes of earning an income, so I am going to do a lot of research before I do anything active and then start my blog (where this information will eventually go). But if you just want to set up a blog and start writing go to http://www.wordpress.com , set up a blog for free and fill your boots.

There are million sites out there telling you “steps to doing a blog for beginners” etc. i.e.:

Step 1 – determine your audience (I don’t agree with this myself, at least not at this point in my journey)

Step 2 – determine if you are capable of blogging.

This means, do you have a lot to say? Do you think you can keep writing on a daily basis? Are you ready for people to criticize and slam your blog? (I assume this will happen to me, at this juncture this is all being done on a word processor and I’m plunking a multitude of pages on my blog all at once when I go live.) This means I’ll have comments and questions. Are you going to have time to respond to people in a timely fashion? (Follow-up note, that was wishful thinking, so far I haven’t really been able to engage people on my blog.) (I plan on researching this later today.)

Now of course, nothing’s written in stone – you can just stop blogging anytime. You can change your topic, you can win the lottery and not need to blog – or maybe you want to blog about winning the lottery and how it’s affected you at any rate, you can be fickle too – in fact web hosts, domain name sellers and the like are counting on it. It’s sort of like gym memberships, if everyone went the gyms would be screwed, they depend especially on the likes of me and my last membership and how I only went a handful of times the whole year but still paid $45 a month. Okay, I guess this is more a note to myself more than anything else but meh, maybe it’ll help you too.

Toodles for now my lovelies, back to the net to do more research and see if I can’t do something to get this show on the road!

WordCamp 2012 – SOLD OUT!

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What will you do unimpeded by fear, other people’s criticism? Would you dance naked in the street, would you run amok? Me, I would write. And so I relegate that fear to the background and step forward … albeit tentatively and brush my hand in the water. It’s a slightly shocking sensation but soothing too. It feels like home. This is the place I’ve been looking for my whole life. Oh the land of blog is very funny place, where everyone wears a funny, funny face 🙂

Now I’m at the WordPress Conference called WordCamp at George Brown College in Toronto. Tons of free swag, gourmet coffee, food – so cool. After party at Habanero’s, woot! (Keep saying I’m too tired but I’m thinking the tired might be outweighed by the networking. Already my best information was in part due to conversations with other attendees.) Even if there isn’t really anything you don’t already know, if you’re someone in the industry, this is a great place to network. Not to mention everything in the computer age is so five minutes ago. These people who have their pulse on the hand of trending and what’s new, hot and up and coming. I went to the session “Go Mobile on WordPress”, a very engaging and witty speaker enlightened me to the fact that more and more people, particularly the younger generation are using their mobile devices to access the web in place of their computers. After he said it, I thought it made perfect sense. However it never would have occurred to me that I would want to consider what kind of theme I was using and how it reacted when uploaded on a mobile device. He said 3 seconds is too long to load, people will leave! Damn Skippy, that’s not a lot of time.

The section for newbs drew me to the conference, but because of my previous excessive blog research over the past few weeks, I actually realized that I knew the vast majority of the “introduction” section. Luckily you’re allowed to slide between one of any three sessions offered in that time slot. In a nutshell, each session is nice and short (45 minutes – with 15 minute breaks in between), there’s a number of speakers, lots of visuals and you really don’t need to take notes because everything’s linked. The whole conference is available on WordPress.tv.

In case you’re wondering, ipod defines streaming as:

“… to start a progressive download of the file, where the file isn’t downloaded to your computer in a lasting way. This is called streaming.”

And there’s a WordCamp for developers coming up in November peeps!