I hope anyone else who lands here after pondering whether to switch from Wordpress.org to Blogger comments below – so we can compare thoughts. Were you wondering how, or why? Are there as few articles about that journey now as there were when I searched--let alone any promise of ease in such a transition?
During my search for tips back in July 2017 I found that my experiences and rationale almost totally matched Jenn’s Wordpress—>Blogger transition story, even to the fact that Google assumed I really meant to ask about switching the other way. (Did hers happen in 2014, or was the post re-dated when she shifted it with her blog, Hello Brio over to Squarespace?) Like Jenn, I want to tell you why ; and in case she decides to ditch that post, I will reflect on her suggestions.
Why I decided that the experiment with self-hosted Wordpress was over
--posting infrequency + not finding the right handle for a static portfolio = insufficient value for $$$ --under my name = wanting it to be perfect --struggle to get it "just right" too time consuming --needing to spend less time at the computer
Why I am switching [back] to Blogger from Wordpress (despite the p tag issue).
Nostalgia. I loved learning to blog here, and have fond memories of when some of my posts made a difference to people.
I still have a hefty collection of posts here, which people are still reading.
It is free.
I think Blogger can do more now than it did then, but I do not need most of the extra functionality self-hosted Wordpress could do.
moonflowerdragon.blogspot looks better on mobile than micameerbach.com
As Jenn suggested, I reconsidered my goals:
Return to one FREE online spot # no particular deadline, although the sooner it is done the sooner I can stop paying for the other domain, yet let’s give enough time to be sure it will work comfortably.
See whether I return to posting more frequently under the pseudonym
It was always about skills/professional development, and it still is, with a few new questions:
What would it take for a blogspot site to be a professional advantage rather than the opposite?
How much of that which I did at micameerbach will remain relevant if republished?
Are any of those posts that stayed so long in draft worth actually posting?
How I plan to switch from Wordpress back to Blogger = Slowly
However, I figured that as I would need to check each post for peculiarities anyway, I might as well consider each of the 111 posts (61 published, 49 drafts, 1 private) manually.
Those peculiarities?
both Jenn and Tracy mentioned that image URLs don’t transfer
Second: This post here, and a (semi)final post there
Third: Up to 111 iterations of:
Pick a post, either the next highest viewed, or any post,
Check whether its URL is cited anywhere else online.
Read it,
Consider: does it offer or demonstrate anything useful?
If it is worth transferring,
in html view, copy and paste everything across to a new post here, but in Open Live Writer (unless Google decide to support p tags in their Blogger editor),
append note about where I had originally posted it, perhaps hyperlink to archive version?
reupload photos and basically re-link everything.
retag & add tag Republished_from_micameerbach
Do not try to anticipate whether formerly internal links will also be transferred, just relink to their WaybackMachineversion, and note them in a Google Doc for later checking
At old post append note about and linking to republication
At old post tag with Republished_at_Moonflowerdragon – let’s me track which ones I’ve done.
If the URL was cited anywhere, contact citers to inform them of new post/archive to avoid broken link.
If it is not worth transferring,
Check whether it is at WaybackMachine
If similar topics/posts here, append at top – link to tag/post]
Tag as Not_republishing
If the URL was cited anywhere, contact citers to inform them of archive version.
For drafts, I could just copy & publish, but that would not help answer the learning questions above, so I could
if publishing: tag it something like drafted@mm / published@MFD
if not publishing, don’t delete but tag it notpublishing@MFD
Finally: Unless I give up earlier, when all 111 iterations are complete:
Count the tags & maybe talk about what if anything I got out of the process
Wind up that account
Celebrate
Image Credit: The beautiful watercolour above is “Bilbo: Back again…” by Kinko-White who kindly gave me permission (via shuzzy) to use it here to symbolise my return home here after an adventure.
Later, maybe, more on why and how...
In the meantime, I'm listening to (and occasionally watching) [Update 14 June 2021 - formerly shared video is no longer available at Youtube]
Motiversity. (2017). Best Motivational Speech Compilation EVER #4 - GET BACK UP - 30-Minute Motivation Video #5. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgS0JG2cgWU
This is an issue I've pondered much to myself but haven't been game to record where I sit. My situation is slightly different: I'm working (part-time) in the profession but I'm also still studying. (And therein lies a tickly topic with other unfinished posts relating to "profession" / qualification levels / exclusion and stratification.) But for now I'll focus on risks or rewards, if any, to a later career by blogging while a student.
"What if a prospective employer takes exception to something I've written?"
"What if I'm wrong, or sound stupid, or ...(yes thank you Ceccy) condescending, or long-winded or..."
"What about all the non-professional posts I make too, should I have separate blogs, but then they'd both have fewer posts"
So, "to blog or not to blog" as one might google - and find oneself not alone in pondering. Charlsie pointed out that in an age when future prospective employers will google us there is as much risk of being under- as over-exposed. Eliminated from consideration for having nothing to say or for having said something unpleasant?
For a more positive perspective I looked for people who believe it was their blogging that got them their job. It turns out (as ever) that there is more to it, such as the skills that we learn and demonstrate writing for a blog as Cameron Plommer showed. Or, as Tyler Durbin discussed, the self we reveal and develop while becoming part of a community. Tyler's opinion spoke to one of my concerns: when one of his commenters suggested that to be helpful towards a career one's blog writing must be "polished, professional and focused on topics relevant to its purpose" (eek, my blog is a wandering), Tyler argued instead for "real, honest and candid".
Like Tyler, "I'm the person that is directly related to the content" of my own blog - so now I have to wonder what my blog reveals about me. Rational? Compassionate? Tech-savvy? Analyser? Synthesiser? I could also consider for future writing what I *want* it to show about me. Tyler links his blog-revelation directly to the type of place at which he now works. Perhaps my blog will not fetch me the few extra hours a fortnight my budget needs now, but over the next few years will it connect me with a team to help a wide variety of people find the weird, wonderful, where-oh-where information they need? Or with experiences I cannot even imagine yet?
Ryan Healy's fifth reason for college students to blog addressed another of my concerns: being wrong. If I can be brave enough to post even when I might be wrong, I can be told (or discover), listen, re-evaluate, compose myself and reveal growth. Con (aka flexnib, mentioned above) was even more forgiving: "ah well, it’s a blog post. It’s not meant to be perfect."
So why am I writing about this now?
Let me catch you up as it has been *cough* a while since I last wrote: I am studying at Charles Sturt University for the Bachelor of Information Studies (Librarianship). Okay so there has been more happening too but that will do to lead into:
Last night my search for an elusive article (abstracts without access to full-text are so frustrating) drifted a delightful blog into my view: At "Old Things with Stories": Lisa Schell brings things, ideas, images, together - in ways and style that connects for me - her choice of images, the blending of professional thinking and personal experience, and it appears the blog was inspired by her graduate LIS studies. (side note for fellow students at CSU: she specialises in Archival Administration and Records Management) You'll understand it was so charming I emailed her to ask for her to open the blog to comments.
Right so, you can imagine my joy to receive a reply this morning. And my gulp when she asked whether I have a blog and I remember that it has been *ahem* since I last posted.
The course at CSU involves reading and posting on our reading to internal CSU forums. Sometimes the requested contributions to forums are not outlet enough for my reactions to my excessive reading but I don't want to burden the students who are finding the work as it is more than enough to keep up with. I've considered channelling some of the overflow here, and then I have to remind myself how long I spend preparing a blogpost and thus how it diverts me from the dreaded essay tasks.
Hmmm, might blogging help me process ideas towards my essays? I'm recalling John Dupuis recently posted on a topic that he had merely touched on in earlier posts - does anyone else explore incomplete notions piecemeal through their blog?
Can you stand a diversion? Son#2's latest interruption in Boolean:
"World of Warcraft" AND "Abbott and Costello"
At work this afternoon I overheard Haze chatting with a patron about the library course, and when it seemed they were chatting about web2.0 technologies I looked up.
It was Di-Dee! Naturally I had to pin her, to personally introduce some of my favourite web2.0 technologies.
But at this early stage in explorations, the most immediate item I hope Di-Dee took away was how to enhance her posts with hyperlinks. If possible, I will insert a quick little video on creating hyperlinks in Blogger, for the students and colleagues newly lured into web2.0
Over a week later, after CaptureFox shut down Firefox dozens of times, and after I couldn't access any video I created with CamStudio, I've finally tried Jing to get the above, please tell me if it doesn't work for you.
Before I could make the video, I was distracted by pondering the thought that once one knows HOW to, there is still the questions of why: whether, when, where.
Immediately I began pondering that question I remembered a book I enjoyed recently. Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters - it took me ages to rediscover the title of that book as it was not in my reading history at CHRLC or UB, because I had borrowed it through BONUS from UTS or Massey (interesting aside, I will be wanting to look up Dewey again because these libraries chose slightly different numbers: 303.4833 .v. 302.231). Say Everything... was immensely readable. Maybe because the interesting societal perspective was balanced with personal, intimate stories of some of the people who are the history of blogging.
Just because hyperlinks = the web and blogging began as regular sharing of hyperlinks, doesn't mean that every blogging purpose is served by hyperlinks. There are plenty of writers about the value of hyperlinks to blogs whose goal is moneymaking and that's why I'm not linking to them. Others like Julie Schopick express their value to expertise sharing, and reputation building. One might see few to no hyperlinks in news blogs (as long as they are truly first with the news) or maybe opinion blogs (although we still expect to see links to online sources that trigger the development of opinion, and the quality of the opinion might be enhanced by quality hyperlinks) or even fiction writers' blogs.
One purpose that probably applies to most blogs is Conversation - and that *is* served by hyperlinks - at least ... oops, I have absorbed that as a fact, without this moment being able to explain just how... can someone help me out with that? Good, yes thanks Julien Frisch:
"If their only function would be to be the glue between those who are writing, a system of reference and reverence, they would already fulfil an important function, one that I consider to be one of the main elements of blogging.
But in fact, the use of hyperlinks is not only a way to create connections to others. Hyperlinking allows completely new forms of writing about ... [fill in your sphere here]...
If hyperlinks become an active part of the language we speak when we write online, we can help to build bridges between those who are already inside the debate and those who want to join. ...
Links are used both as reverence mechanism between peers but also as cognitive bridges for those who would not understand the full extend of an article without this relational guidance by the author, without forcing the latter to (re)write what has already been written before." (Frisch, 2009, ¶8)
Darn it, this is turning into another long post I shouldn't be spending time on with all the shopping, booking and packing I still need to do... but having found such interesting articles I do want to share them....
Julien's inspiration: Venkatesh Rao's The Rhetoric of The Hyperlink is another must-read and I recommend it also to my writer friends. I will only quote one of his interesting comments, which happens to sum up the point of hyperlinking shared by for-money, for-giving-expertise, for-conversation and for-the-writing blogs: becoming reliable:
"Real hyperlink artists know that paradoxically, the more people are tempted to click away from your content, the more they want to keep coming back. There is a set of tradeoffs involving compactness, temptation to click, foreshadowing to eliminate surprise (and retain the reader), and altruism in passing on the reader. But the medium is friendlier to generosity in yielding the stage." (Rao, 2009, ¶8)
Actually that conversation probably gives me a partial answer to my question: when?
I had sought to find ready-made advice on when and when not to hyperlink...unsuccessfully.
However I did find: Penny Coutas with the same question amongst others in her mind when puzzling over a style for hyperlinking in her online academic writing. In fact, fellow CULLB602C students may find it useful to consider Penny's thoughts when preparing their own assignments online.
I am glad Penny mentioned her discovery that online academic journals do not optimise the use of hyperlinks but rather use print-based referencing styles. I have found the same. Penny also has an answer (no) for morgan who once asked if I knew whether APA allow a different rule for online publications.
Personally I recommend when writing for academic purpose online, do both. As Felix Salmon (2010) concluded in his opinion piece Why links belong in text "Someone writing online should no more put their links at the end of their essay than a university professor should first give the lecture and then run through the slides." When the medium is online, optimise for online reading. If the purpose is academic and if there is either academic requirement or the possibility of print publication, then use print referencing style too. (If you're writing in html spaces rather than pdf or other web-accessible docs you might seek clarification on whether you need hanging indented paragraphs in the reference list.).
Felix wrote Why links belong in text in response to Nicholas Carr's complaints about how distracting hyperlinks can be. Felix dismisses nick's point about the big distraction - being drawn away from the original article: "In these days of tabbed browsing, there’s a difference between clicking and clicking away: most of us, I’m sure, control-click many times per day while reading something interesting, letting tabs accumulate in the background as we find interesting citations we want to read later." (Salmon, 2010, ¶6) That's certainly how I avoid losing my place.
However I would sometimes (particularly when there are 'too many' links) relate to nick's second point: "Other times, they're tiny distractions, little textual gnats buzzing around your head. Even if you don't click on a link, your eyes notice it, and your frontal cortex has to fire up a bunch of neurons to decide whether to click or not. You may not notice the little extra cognitive load placed on your brain, but it's there and it matters." (Carr, 2010, 2010, ¶3). I also relate completely to Felix's response that in certain situations (particularly when author's cite someone else) " I expect a link and there’s much more cognitive load placed on my brain — there’s much more buzzing in my frontal cortex — if there isn’t a link there than if there is." (Salmon, 2010, ¶1)
Pursuing the notion of "too many hyperlinks" for advice from a different perspective. I found that Torley (yes of Second Life video tutorial fame) advises to hyperlink sparingly, and shares his approach (2008, ¶7) "I'll hyperlink to shed light on inspirations + influences behind a post. I'll hyperlink to provide contact info, and "further details" too onerous, too rich to cram onto a single page."
To other bloggers: how do you decide what to hyperlink?
For me, the hyperlinks I create are for a reader like me, they offer links I think I'd find potentially useful:
explaining an idea better than I have
providing a reference or credit for material I quote (or further reading)
backtracing my stimuli
To avoid an excess of hyperlinks:
If you're using Zemanta don't link every word in your post for which Wikipedia has an article.
Remember that readers can select words or phrases we need clarified and right click for a google search. (for that fact I appreciate the reminder from Jack, one of Venkat's readers).
That last point is also advice to readers... for whom I have more:
To online readers who may be stressed by "too many" hyperlinks - adapt the rules for crossing a road safely: Before you click: Stop Look Listen Think.
Stop: Don't click, just hover and; Look: read the URL "where it goes" displayed in browser footer Listen: listen to the article you're already reading Think: do you really need or want to explore that link?
Then if you still want to check it out, use Right-Click, Open in New Tab
I will also be looking into the Readability plugin that apparently helps readers by removing all the extraneous stuff around the article we want to read. It has recently been updated with an optional feature so that (if I understand it correctly) hyperlinks are made less visible (can still be seen on hover) but listed completely as footnotes.
And just for the practice...
References
Carr, N. (2010, May 31). Experiments in delinkification [Web log post]. Rough Type. Retrieved from http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/05/experiments_in.php
Coutas, P. (2010, June 7). Wikipedia as style guide? [Web log post]. Exploring the Hype(r) of Languages Learning and Teaching. Retrieved from http://www.exploringthehyper.net/blog/2010/06/wikipedia-as-style-guide/
Frisch, J. (2009, July 7). Creating a European public sphere: the hyperlink story [Web log post]. Julien Frisch. Retrieved from http://julienfrisch.blogspot.com/2009/07/creating-european-public-sphere.html
Rao, V. (2009, July 1). The rhetoric of the hyperlink [Web log post]. ribbonfarm.com Retrieved from http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/07/01/the-rhetoric-of-the-hyperlink/
Salmon, F. (2010, June 2). Why links belong in text [Web log post]. Reuters. Retrieved from http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2010/06/02/why-links-belong-in-text/
Torley. (2008, April 21). Hyperlink sparingly [Web log post]. Musical dream journal. Retrieved from http://torley.com/hyperlink-sparingly
Save to draft. I appreciate that Flickr might need to keep it simple so it remains cross-platform. We can style our post up according to our own blogging platform's editing methods. BUT, the way it is at the moment, blogging a photo directly from Flickr means a Publish without any polish, and that means autofeeds like Twitterfeed let people see a post in a state that we would probably *not* prefer, like this one was before I began this post-publication editing.
ALL proper attribution data. As well as the image's title and uploader (which is all I get now) I need the date the image was published at Flickr and the licence by which I may publish it. The description might also contain important information - unfortunately it might also contain too much information, so I'd at least like the option to include the description.
Show me what will be sent. When we set up our blog for Flickr we can choose a layout template for our posts - but unless we're blogging from Flickr often, who remembers how they chose? And who remembers how to find the page that enables us to change the template, not that that page shows what our current choice is. So, while composing my post (that I want to be able to send as draft) I want to see all the proper attribution (and optional) data laid out according to the Flickr-template I've chosen. Unfortunately this is what I was shown while composing, but not what was sent:
So are there alternatives?
AddThis enablessave to draft, but doesn't grab code accessing the image - Perhaps there are other browser add-ons, or platform plug-ins & if so please tell me about them.
Unfortunately, for some reason the generated code only includes the image title on hover, not with the photo. And I still don't have the upload date or any relevant information that might have been provided in the description.
Use Embed code available from All sizes screen
Unfortunately this is what we get from that embed code:
Just the photo and link, no attribution data at all.
kwout
If I kwout (with an image map) from the photostream I can select to show Title, licence, and date, and you can deduce uploader from automated title. However, description is missing, it is small, and it doesn't quite meet Flickr's terms because it doesn't directly to the photo's own page:
Alternatively, if I kwout (with image map) from the photo's page: the date, uploader and licence data are not within range of the image for kwout to grab, although you can see amongst the miscellanea in the description there is other relevant attribution information:
And because it was fun... the stimulus for this contemplation of problems blogging from Flickr ... was a post I created at Tumblr solving a puzzle for The Clueless Librarian:
Thanks to my sister getting her wiggle on and not only posting to her new blog (Caterpillar Contemplations), but also thinking of her likely readers who may want to get her updates by email...
But I'm not going to describe how because all the (very simple) instructions are at Blogger Tricks. I do suggest you read all the instructions - I read the first and then raced in to my sister to tell her it goes through Feedburner and we basically puzzled the rest of it through. Only when I came back here to tell you (fellow library students at UB) about it did I notice the rest of the instructions that would have saved us so much time!
Something somewhere commented on the simplicity of getting started blogging with Posterous. Lately I’ve been watching fellow students start an exploration of web2.0 technologies in relation to libraries and information literacy – with a first blog at Blogger.
Blogger is very easy to get started with. But I wonder if it is easy enough for people who are not already motivated … I mean for those who wouldn’t have been looking to blog at all if not for the subject in their course?
Via their default methods, Tumblr is even simpler than Posterous for getting started, although Posterous also have a simple online sign up page. Their default methods:
Naturally I had a go at setting up blogs at both. I did try to capture the process, but unfortunately CaptureFox didn't seem to like my setting preferences and shut down Firefox on me. I give up on that particular idea for now. In fact, considering I have so much to do to prepare for the family trip to US/Canada I must not let myself be diverted into trying out these services thoroughly.
Instead, I perused reviews:
Chris Foresman concludes in favour of Tumblr, citing its "myriad options for posting"; "design flair"; variety of themes; "separation of content types" and options for text editing. Chris acknowledged Posterous' "ease of posting via e-mail"; "clever auto-uploading and auto-formatting of attached media"; that some might prefer its "spartan design aesthetic".
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry believes the chief difference (demonstrated in their default sign up methods) is that Tumblr's apparent focus on design gives it an edge over Posterous' engineering focus.
Anna Frenkel's very thorough comparison was more thorough in detailing the advantages of each over the other, and I ended up with the impression that the choice will depend on the potential blogger's purpose and preferred way to post.
Perhaps for ?mature? students who are very comfortable with email and aren't interested in fussing with the appearance of their blog Posterous might be the way to go. For first time bloggers who don't feel attached to email or perhaps want more appearance options Tumblr could be preferred.
I will note that a (?second) step in the setup process for Posterous (I think) was an offer to look for my "friends" through other services and then suggested I set up my friends with a daily posting from my Posterous. I don't like either option. I particularly don't like them being offered in the setup stages.
Something I have not discovered is how each handles comments - which for social web students is an important element to explore. Can someone clarify for me whether either of them simply feature commenting without any special addons or plugins?
As the students I’m thinking of are library students I went looking to see whether any libraries or librarians use either service:
I have now subscribed to Julie Cornett's adventures as a Frontier Librarian via Posterous - after her post on Information Competency using Interactive Television caught my eye, I found interesting library stuff (and/or beautiful photos) in all her posts. And she has comments that don't appear to have required any plugins.
I've noticed Zemanta at other sites once or twice before, particularly with related article recommendations at the bottom of posts, but being busy with other things didn't explore it. With this 30 posts in 30 days effort, and my personal ambition to not spend so long (hours/days/unending) creating a post... I wonder whether Zemanta will prove useful. Students in CULLB602C@UB might like to take a look too.
It came back to my attention via Blogger Buzz, although I'm not sure how I landed there (and I do hate not remembering my backtrail). The following quote came from Zemanta's reblog feature that you can now see bottom right of this post. Options with reblog are to publish or copy code, I'd prefer a save as draft option. In the quote Rick is talking about how the add-on works:
Here's how it works: while you write your blog post in Blogger, Zemanta opens up a sidebar next to the Blogger post editor. After you've written a few sentences, Zemanta analyzes the words in your post and suggests images and video that are relevant to your post; with one click, it inserts them into your post. Rick Klau, Blogger Buzz: Zemanta helps you "blog smarter", Jun 2009
The whole article is worth a read.
It was very quick to get started, takes a little longer to optimise - at least optimising is what I was trying to do by adding my blog and rss feeds with preferences, only now I'm not receiving any content recommendations. Oh well, must go shopping for gear for the trip so will look again next time.
...motivated me to look for a template for my blog that would suit me better. I found one that looked perfect.
Unfortunately it wouldn't work for me. :-( Sigh
After uploading the new template file, I would have lost a bundle of widgets and so had the option to keep them. Unfortunately the choice was to keep them all, or none. And for some reason the old header and posts sections were considered widgets. I did keep all widgets but I cringed in wonder at what would result.
The posts in the main content didn't have my AddThis button or edit pencil or the date and each post's "Links to this post" appeared closer to the next post than the one it related to. But there was a second set of posts in the side bar where all those features were. The other widgets in the side bar were all mixed up - now they were easy to reorder but for some reason their spacing did not match the display template's spacing and I noticed that the template sourced a spacer gif from photobucket I think so I guess that blogger wasn't able to retrieve that gif for my blog.
I fiddled and fiddled for hours trying to sort it all out, but I clearly just do not know enough to fix it.
Now I must hie to bed, still so many things to organise for our trip.
Blogging is playing with yourself... in public... in a good way.
Now that is not what I had planned to write. I had planned to explore why I am having trouble eking out a particular set of posts that have been in draft for more than four weeks. Becoming bored with my blathering about that I edited and edited until that (the above) slipped out. Maybe I will still get to my problem, but first...
Blogging is playing with yourself?
Its not a new notion, nor is it particularly accurate, but I do want to play with it. :-D
Quickly and briefly garnering others' thoughts via google:
Tim Bull asked in the title of a post of Digital Narcissism: Is blogging playing with yourself? He did not actually go on to answer at all, unless you count his excusing "the best of bloggers" who he says are referred to as "citizen journalists".
Drew Richardson encourages playing with yourself in the nature of self-competition to develop creative problem solving.
Of course aside from a few results relating specifically or euphemistically to masturbation there are also many results relating to computer/video games one plays solo.
So is it (blogging) playing with oneself?
[please do give your opinion, or share a link to an interesting opinion on that question]
Well... in a way it is self-pleasuring: Exploring one's ideas, stroking them, usually or occasionally getting to the point, massaging one's words until finally perhaps reaching a satisfying conclusion.
Undeniably it is public. And by that very fact it means bloggers are not (just) playing with ourselves. Even those of us who do not aim for a large audience are still sharing our thoughts, offering them for others to discover, observe and possibly comment on.
I still don't know why I dally so over the posts I have in draft, but I clearly remember why I am blogging:
to play
to gather some of my independent learning
to ask others to contribute to my learning
to participate in global communication and sharing
to share a little of myself with friends I cannot see very often
I've had this pinned since ADHD Librarian made the pledge he linked as being in full at Modern & Awkward.
I, moonflowerdragon, pledge that:
I will never comment on a blog saying "Why do we care?" because if I don't care, I can go away from the blog. Instead I will sit back and have a good five-minute think about my life.
I will not sign up to Twitter or a blog just to write "I am getting my hair done" or other inanities [me: didn't sign up to do it doesn't mean you won't find me doing it if I'm having desperate month]. Every message I write will [endeavour to] be entertaining and/or informative; e.g. "Getting a beehive hairdo so I won't fit under the parking garage clearance pole" or "I am on fire, please assist me." (Note: The latter is appropriate only if my hair is, in reality, on fire.)
...
I will only add up to one application per month on Facebook. This application will not be a zombie maker, werewolf maker, "top friends" maker, or anything that serves no purpose and is not, again, entertaining and/or informative.
[I will not trick people into seeing any images that they might find disturbing, because that's not funny and it never will be funny]
I will not add a signature to my forum posts that is more than half the length of my average post. I will definitely not put ASCII art in my signature, because I recognize that 1993 is over and the Internet has pictures.
...
I will never leave a comment expressing adulation or criticism in three or fewer words, unless I am doing so in an altogether unique way. "FAIL" is not a unique way. Neither is "LOLzers."
eclecticlibrary even tagged my posts on citing blog posts & comments - is eclectic library actually Morgan of librariesinteract.info?
That was fun. I don't appear to get enough visits to warrant a pro account with MyBlogLog though I have preliminary approval from the boys to do so whenever I like because they enjoyed my excitement about my blog being visited!
Funnily enough, I didn't notice that when it would have popped up in my rss feed, I only discovered it after experimenting with the visual search engine Pagebull, which looks like it could be immensely valuable for certain types of visual learners if the search ?algorithms? are as rigorous as we expect from textual engines. Not that I have the knowledge of such to compare, or guess whether it would be or not, just meaning to comment that while screenshots are great fun (and colourful) most important will still be relevance of results, with both it would seem to be a really good idea.
When Graham Bates was telling me about his interesting idea to solve Victoria's water crisis by colocating a thermal multi-effect distillation desalination plant at Portland Aluminium to make use of their waste heat to produce maybe 200 megalitres a day, I thought that a blog might be a great way to promote the idea.
A blog could also be a way to explore and develop such ideas, but Graham is still a little "computer1.0" (you know offline office tools ;) ) so he'd already fleshed it out into a documented concept paper. While I could cut and paste its sections into blog posts and link them together carefully, it wasn't going to be efficient for Graham's editing processes.
We experimented with Zohowriter, Thinkfree and Googledocs to get his concept paper online. Only Zohowriter included his footnotes, though it moved them from original page-bottoms to end of document. None of them completely retained his original formatting, and we did have to reconfigure the images, and convert a textbox to a table in Zohowriter. We discovered that Thinkfree would publish a pdf for others to view, although we couldn't upload a pdf there and Thinkfree lost the footnotes, so while ideal in the former respect, it became useless as a result of the latter. If anyone knows a free and easy-to-use file store and share site (that allows upload and public access of pdfs) please tell me.
I still thought that a blog would be useful for exposure, but I didn't get to it right away. With the media attention after the Glenelg Shire's Council meeting last week it became potentially even more useful an idea, so we sketched it up this week. Unfortunately someone who hasn't actually done anything with it has already tied up the preferred blogtitle, so Graham went with...
Hm, one of the CIL2007 bloggers mentioned MyBlogLog ... so I took a peek and I'm curious (well who isn't?) so I signed up to that too. An email telling me I'd been automatically joined to a (n apparantly default) community today had me checking back to see that a few people had at least scanned my profile there. I wondered why - did they like my avatar or screen name or just randomly clicked (if you're ever this way jessica217, sevn, holiday, please see if you remember and tell me)? They don't appear to have checked out my blog though - which I don't mind seeing as I blog for me.
However my curiosity did take me further, so though the latest posts at sevn's The Wrong Advices weren't relevant for me, his most popular post: Blogging is harder than you think, prompted me to at least make a note about the post, because it was interesting.
He's writing about Successful blogging - which presumes an other-centered purpose for blogging. Some of us blog more for the log than the web, with readership a bonus if it happens. A really big bonus for me if people who want to hear from me actually subscribe to my blog feed rather than wait for a letter (yeah I know letters would contain somewhat different stuff but if one wants to know what I'm doing one would at least see part of that here)!
The point that prompted me to write?:
Writing regularly: It’s not easy writing everyday, let alone writing something interesting and insightful, but you need to try. Even if it’s just a thought or an idea you had, or a comment on someone else’s blog. You want to get into the habit of writing, so that in time you can slowly build up your output. Even if you don’t end up posting what you write make sure to save it. I often go through my old notes and find ideas that are worth revisiting.
There's lots of other advice too: about being honest, open, yourself; learning from others; not obsessing; commenting; joining blogosphere; helping others.
Somewhat related (at least in relation to the hard work) is advice at problogger. It's curious I drifted by two blogs about successful blogging today, maybe my guardian is trying to tell me something.
Hm, oh yeah I'm mentioning problogger because of that journey: Darren's post How Google Blogsearch ranks your Posts... In their own words! popped in my google alert for +del.icio.us and +blogger (hoping to find a hack for getting a del.icio.us daily post here). Now because I don't have a daily post yet, and possible future relevance is a rather unlikely purpose for having tagged it for my own sake, maybe someone (like Rachel) might find it useful sooner.
![Bilbo: Back again... [water colour by Kinko-White] beautifully conveys how I feel about coming home to this blog after my adventure in self-hosting elsewhere](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhyn-_2mmRan61Nr4q6stTi7NEKyOx5UQ3W-OsHZ10f6yAppA2p-2WlOrRh7qXtMwDX_L9q-BBA7Xn_d6q8dZCHNtoNVbvGOuwoHEHVtWip5ExWMRvCJ6zCGNLQhc1xXWeXM9OoA/?imgmax=800 "Bilbo: Back again... by Kinko-White")
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vC8YBmJup0Txg09UUR9NGNnl8fLnzYvSAjYtK8qEvaQ6QmzL70FQ-zSa9avBcidF63LjDGCTlVRAwS3DZqD-Xk2ybVjgf7mXDAFZsA9cv9UvMPYIUJ8gpQam3k0halXGSezIoSMaQBStFr8E8JvErr=s0-d)
