Tag: blogging

Anil Dash: 15 Years of Blogging post

Am I an artist?

I Know You Are
The Bad Chemicals, used by permission
About six years ago, my friend Dan sent me a link to 15 Lessons from 15 Years of Blogging by a guy named Anil Dash. Now that I’ve hit that milestone, I want to see if he was correct.

I Typos in posts don’t reveal themselves until you’ve published. “If you schedule a post to publish in the future, the typos will be revealed then. This is an absolute, inviolable rule of blogging.” Heck, yeah. It’ll be something that I KNOW how to spell. Of COURSE, I know the difference between two, to, and two. But my fingers, apparently, do not.

II Link to everything you create elsewhere on the web. That’s a good idea. I should do that, but I don’t. I’m counting on the Wayback Machine. Not incidentally, I became sad to note the disappearance of the Dustbury blog by Charles G. Hill. Fortunately, it is still archived.

III Always write with the idea that what you’re sharing will live for months and years and decades. Yes, I find that I get requests for information about my late friend Raoul Vezina years after I wrote about him.

IV Always write for the moment you’re in. That IS something I try to do.

Better luck next time

V The scroll is your friend. I love maybe half of what I write. But there’s tomorrow. If I labor over a piece too long, in general, the more paralyzed I am as a writer. I try not to do this.

VI Your blog can change your life in a month. People find me at this blog regularly, and they tell me things about my relatives and friends that I never knew before. It can be powerful stuff.

VII There is absolutely no pattern to which blog posts people will like. This is SO true. If you Google “Spaulding krullers” (a doughnut), guess what is #1? My 2014 post.

VIII The personal blog is an important, under-respected art form. I’m an artist! Someone said that to me at some point in the last couple of years. I poo-pooed it because I can’t draw a lick. But I do SOMETHING here. Some people think I’m a good writer. I cannot judge that, but I AM persistent, at least.

This post is a blogging sin

IX Meta-writing about a blog is generally super boring. “(That probably includes this post.)” I do tend to avoid them, unlike in my early blogging period when I’d note every lunaversary. This is true: “Certainly the world doesn’t need any more ‘sorry I haven’t written in a while’ posts.” Fortunately, I’ve never written one.

X The tools for blogging have been extraordinarily stagnant. I dunno. My WordPress plugins are always doing something, but they use terms I don’t understand. And the great innovation of the WordPress block editor escapes me. (And if you don’t understand that, well, neither do I.)

XI If your comments are full of @$$4013$, it’s your fault. On this blog, I’ve only regularly had one post that regularly generates the schmucks, and I’ve shut ’em down. (It was me writing a response post over three years ago, and the racists comments STILL show up, but I reject them.

XII The most meaningful feedback happens on a very slow timeframe. I’ve said it before: blogging is like slow cooking,

XIII It’s still early. If you have a voice, use it.

XIV Leave them wanting more. I never think, “I have to capture all my thoughts on this idea and write it about it definitively once and for all.” And I might change my mind. So, thanks, Anil Dash.

Blogging is hard – 15 years

equilibrium

SMBC
By kind permiission of SMBC Comics. “Fixing Social Media”
Even I have a difficult time believing this. I have posted a blog item every day since May 2, 2005. 15 years! Tough to believe because blogging is hard.

I enjoyed this story. “Media executives sometimes operate under the impression that writers are interchangeable, or that they could even do the job themselves. Now we get to watch how that turns out.” This was culled from a bigger article that also serves as a link dump on the subject.

Blogging is hard, especially if you are trying to make a living at it, which, fortunately, I’m not. There are new bloggers who don’t know why they haven’t gotten thousands of followers and hundreds of dollars per day.

As someone said, “To make money you gotta have a niche, and you damn well better like that niche. ‘“This blog is about portraits of Abraham Lincoln molded from earwax. Our community is scattered around the globe but very dedicated.'”

bloguer est difficile

Blogging is hard because the blog is, ideally, a dialogue with your audience. Some of my best commenters have, to put it gently, been going through stuff. And one, Dustbury, died last year. Uncomfortably, on 09/09/2019, my blog received 1703 views, 1479 specifically about his death.

One of his fellow acolytes, Fillyjonk, who has had recent troubles of her own, has been blogging over 18 years.

If you don’t want to write about COVID-19 every single day – and I don’t – blogging is particularly hard. I can’t write about the plays and movies I saw because I didn’t see them. Because my wife and daughter are home, I’m not able to carve out as much Roger time as the retiree had gotten used to having.

Perhaps there are folks out there watching videos, bingeing on TV series, and devouring books. To quote the poet, I ain’t me, babe.

So why do it? Why blog? Because there are things I wouldn’t know if I didn’t blog intermittently. In fact, there are things I’d forget in five minutes if I hadn’t blogged about it. Admittedly, there are few things I blogged about and still forget about.

And I blog to maintain my sanity (if any), my equilibrium. I try to keep my mind working trying to find the next subject.

An American album, as it were

U.S. Blues

AmericanBack in the early days of this blog, i.e., 2005, a bunch of bloggers – Fred Hembeck, Lefty Brown, Greg Burgas, Johnny Bacardi, Thom Wade, Eddie Mitchell, Gordon Dymowski, Tom Collins, and several others across the country- created a series of mixed CD exchanges. We’d burn collections of music and mail them to each other. Kind of quaint, eh? This was one of the earliest I created, if not the first. It’s an American album of sorts.

US: American Roulette – Robbie Robertson. From his first solo album, post-The Band.
NY: New York, New York – Ryan Adams, who has the same birthday as Bryan Adams, November 5.
NJ: Atlantic City – The Band, post-Robbie Robertson, cover Bruce Springsteen.
PA: Allentown – Billy Joel.
MD: Baltimore – Peter Case.

DC: The Bourgeois Blues – Taj Mahal, written by Leadbelly
VA: I Believe – Blessed Union of Souls.
NC: Take the Train to Charlotte – Fiddlin’ John Carson, one of my go-to songs.
SC: Darlington County – Bruce Springsteen.
GA: Oh, Atlanta – Alison Krauss.

FL: Gator on the Lawn – Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. From the box set.
AL: Alabamy Home – the Gotham Stompers, an instrumental from “1930s Jazz- The Small Combos.”
MS: The Jazz Fiddler – the Mississippi Sheiks, from the “Roots & Blues” box set, as is NC.
LA: Down at the Twist & Shout – Mary Chapin Carpenter. My problem with her is that I can never remember where I file her, under Car or Ch.
TX: That’s Right (You’re Not from Texas) – Lyle Lovett

More states

So, I guess I created two or three more collections, but I can’t find them, alas. Off the top, what else would I pick?

AZ: By the Time I Get to Phoenix – Glen Campbell or maybe Isaac Hayes
CA: Goin’ to California – Led Zeppelin (and you thought I’d go with the Beach Boys!)
DE: Delaware Slide– George Thorogood & The Destroyers, though I did not own that album at the time
ID: Private Idaho – B-52’s
IL: Goin’ to Chicago – Jimmy Rushing On Vocals With The Benny Goodman Orchestra

MO: Kansas City – Wilbert Harrison
MT: Montana – Frank Zappa
NV: Leaving Las Vegas – Sheryl Crow
OK: Oklahoma Hills – Arlo Guthrie, written by his father Woody
OR: Portland, Oregon – Loretta Lynn with Jack White

What would you pick, either in lieu of my choices or filling in the blanks? I can think of two slots for John Denver, and several for Springsteen.

And finally, back to US: U.S. Blues – The Harshed Mellows at 11:05, from the Deadicated album.

A fortnight of years of blogging

“There is only one characteristic that distinguishes writers from non-writers: writers write. (That’s why there’s no such thing as an ‘aspiring writer.’)

14 ballIt’s another anniversary at Ramblin’ with Roger. If 14 days is a fortnight, is fourteen years a fortnight of years? Probably not. Don’t care. (Not to be confused with Fortnite, which I’ve never played.)

You may have noticed that I’ve changed the look of the blog in the past month or so. This was not done for aesthetic reasons but rather operational ones. My old design was clashing with some PHP function – too boring to explain, frankly.

So I changed to some WordPress in-house style called Twenty Sixteen. I like that it does the pull quotes, that the comments are on the side, and the basic clean look. I need to tweak it eventually.

Of course, earlier posts may look “off” – pictures too wide, notably. But I don’t foresee changing the previous output any time soon.

I came across this article called The State of Blogging: Post Length and Publishing Frequency Trends. “The proportion of bloggers who typically write posts under 500 words has steadily declined since 2014.” The vast majority of my posts are under that threshold.

“…while the proportion of bloggers who typically write posts longer than 1,000 words has steadily increased.” I doubt I have five posts TOTAL out of over 5000 that have over a thousand words. I am a blogging dinosaur; so be it.

I am occasionally reminded why I blog. One of the factors was the Inaugural post of the late Steve Gerber, who wrote, among other things, The Defenders, Howard the Duck, and Man-Thing.

He wrote back on April 4, 2005: “There is only one characteristic that distinguishes writers from non-writers: writers write. (That’s why there’s no such thing as an ‘aspiring writer.’ A writer can aspire to sell or publish, but only non-writers aspire to write.)”

Less than a month later, I started this blog, which proves that I am susceptible to suggestion. It makes me a good hypnosis subject and a dogged daily blogger.

Image by wisconsinpics from Pixabay

The hardest and easiest thing about blogging

Dora, from Having Coffee With Peppy, has the tag “I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.” By Edgar Alan Poe

I know her from ABC Wednesday. She writes:

What do you find the hardest and easiest thing about blogging? Coffee is on.

For me, the easiest thing about blogging is finding topics to write about. If one is reasonably observant, subjects find you. What are you reading? I skim a LOT on the Internet: left and right-wing politics, for instance. I’m an old political science major, so that’s interesting to me.

What are you doing? I listen to music, see movies, read books, live in an ever-changing America.

I see these questions in Quora, some of them sent directly to me: “What should I blog about?” they plead. How the heck do I know? I have no idea because I’m not them.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I really like to know what the topics of my posts are going to be.

For instance, I know that in November, I already know I’ll do something about Veterans Day and Thanksgiving and the Great American Smokeout and my mother’s birthday. In fact, I’ve already written the post about Veterans Day, because I realized it was the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I. Something came to me, and I wrote it.

I can be very patient. I probably wrote that 11/11 piece in July, because it told me to be written. Far be it from me not to listen to a piece when it wants to be created.

Another thing in November is the 20th anniversary of when I first appeared on the game show JEOPARDY! The subconscious is working on that now, and when I see something related to the show, I throw it in the draft for November 9. Some point soon, I’ll put something together. I really do hope it writes itself because I’ve tackled the subject in the past and don’t want to rehash.

The hardest thing about writing a blog is time. Work, church, meetings, helping the Daughter with homework, mowing the lawn all take chunks of time. There was a point less than a year ago that I had 70 posts written and scheduled. Right now, it’s 29.

You might think that’s a lot but they’re not all for the next month. On September 23, I thought, “What am I going to write for October 4 or 5?” And I was actually pleased that I found a piece I had written on 9 July but curiously had not published; I changed two sentences and scheduled it.

I was then set for the next two weeks, except for the linkorama post at the end of the month, which I tend not to finish until two or three days before it posts. Now, if I don’t write something for the next two days – entirely possible – I don’t get anxious.

Whereas I HATE creating on a deadline, even a self-imposed one because it’s much harder for me to write. My way-too-long piece on John McCain I had to write and then post in a day or two because it would be of much less value a few weeks later.