How to Follow Just the Content You Want on This Blog

I explain how to follow this blog in a way that weeds out the content you don’t care about.

One of the things in my life that I’m proud of is that I’m interested in a lot of things. My friend Bill refers to this as curiosity — I’m curious about things so I learn more about them. But while others might be content with getting quick answers to any burning questions about a topic, I’m often willing to do a deep dive and learn more, sometimes firsthand by doing. That’s what got me involved in things like beekeeping, jewelry making, glass fusing, and other “hobbies gone wild.”

And then I blog about it to share some of what I’ve learned.

I’ve been blogging since 2003 — yeah, I’m coming up on 20 years now! — and this blog’s 2300+ posts cover a lot of topics in a wide variety of ways. Back when I first started blogging and people were writing about making “successful blogs,” they all recommended one thing: stick to a topic. If you’ve explored this blog at all, you know that’s a recommendation I have been unable to follow. I write about lots of topics because I’m interested in lots of topics. And while it is possible to maintain multiple blogs, I simply don’t want to do that.

What does that leave my readers with? A hodgepodge of posts about all kinds of things: jewelry making, flying helicopters, cooking, computers, reading/writing, video creation, etc., etc. The list goes on and on.

I’m not too naive to realize that not everyone is interested in everything that I am. And not everyone comes here to read every word. In fact, I’m sure I lose a lot of new readers by delivering up posts about topics that don’t interest them nearly as much as the topics that originally brought them here. I get it.

I addressed this the other day after a comment from a reader named Susan brought it up:

Comment
An exchange on this blog between me and Susan, who likes the fact that I cover a lot of topics here. That weird symbol is supposed to be a shrug emoji.

With all that said, I thought I’d take a moment to help readers zero in on just the new content that interests them using several techniques.

Subscribe and Choose

Subscribe Form
Here’s what the form looks like. You can find it near the top of the sidebar on any page of this site.

The easiest way to learn about new content that might interest you is to subscribe to the blog via email. You’ll find a form on the sidebar on every page. Put your email address in it and click the button. You’ll get a confirmation in email to make sure you really want it.

From that point forward, you’ll get an email message every time I post something new — generally two to 20 times a month. See a topic that interests you? Click the link in the email to come here and read it. Otherwise, just delete the email.

And you can always get off the list. The unsubscribe feature really does work.

I don’t use this for anything other than blog post updates. I don’t share email addresses. I don’t spam.

Follow Me on Twitter

If you’re on Twitter and you don’t want your inbox to take in any more subscriptions, you can follow me on Twitter. I’m @mlanger there. All of my new blog posts are automatically tweeted to my account, so it’s the same as subscribing to the blog. But you also get a running commentary of maximum 240-character posts of what I’m thinking about or doing.

(Some folks would likely prefer the blog subscription.)

Bookmark a Topic

All the blog posts here are assigned a category (topic) and most are assigned at least one tag. (Topics are listed on every page in the sidebar; tags are listed on the home page in a cloud format in the sidebar.) This makes it easy for readers to find the content they want that interests them. But did you know that you could bookmark a category (topic) or tag?

Share This
You’ll find a Share This area at the end of each blog post.

On a post that interests you, scroll down to the Share This area. In addition to icons you can click to share the post on various social media and via email — which I do encourage you to use if you think your friends might enjoy it — there is a “Posted in” section and a “Tagged” section, each of which are followed by links. Click the category (topic) or tag link that closely matches what interests you. You’ll see a page with the most recent posts with the same category (topic) or tag.

Bookmark that page. This is something you do in your browser and I’m not going to explain how because there are lots of browsers and each has its own method. I know that in Firefox, which I use on my computers, the shortcut key to get started in Command-D (I’m on a Mac).

New Jewelry Making Topic

If you’ve got sharp eyes, you may have noticed the new Jewelry Making topic in the sidebar. I added that the other day. I’d been using the Hobbies Gone Wild topic for posts related to jewelry making and realized that that particular endeavor had progressed far beyond what one would consider a hobby. So I pulled those posts out into their own category, mostly to make it easy for folks interested in jewelry making to find them..

Once you’ve bookmarked the category or topic, you can check in periodically to see if there’s anything new of interest to you. I recommend once a month, although you could come by more frequently. You might want to do the same thing with any other sites/blogs that interests you. Then make check in part of your routine — maybe a rainy Saturday morning coffee routine.

And do you see that Add a Comment link in the Share This area? Here’s a tip: you can click that and add a comment about what you’ve just read and maybe encourage me to write more about it. After all, it was Susan’s comment (shown above) that got me to write this.

Subscribe to an RSS Feed of a Topic

In the old days we used Feed Readers to follow blogs without having to go to the blog itself. Do those things still exist?

Although I know I’ve written extensively about feeds in the past, I’m not going to do so again here. Instead, I’ll share this from the WordPress glossary:

A feed is a function of special software that allows “Feedreaders” to access a site automatically looking for new content and then posting the information about new content and updates to another site. This provides a way for users to keep up with the latest and hottest information posted on different blogging sites. Some Feeds include RSS (alternately defined as “Rich Site Summary” or “Really Simple Syndication”), Atom or RDF files. Dave Shea, author of the web design weblog Mezzoblue has written a comprehensive summary of feeds. Feeds generally are based on XML technology.

If you’re a bit of a techie and want to use feedreader to follow topics in blog, be aware that you can modify a blog’s feed URL to specify a specific category (topic) or tag. For example, if you’re interested in flying and want to subscribe with your feedreader to a feed about that category (topic), you might try

http://www.AnEclecticMind.com/category/flying/feed

(Too techie for you? Me, too. When I stopped writing computer how-to books around 2012, I stopped being a techie and became a mere user. Now I don’t research and write about any tech unless it’s related to something I need to do with my computers.)

The idea is to set up your feedreader with all the blogs that interest you and open that application when you want to check in on your favorite blogs.

The Point

The point of all this is that you don’t have to visit the blog and wade through whatever’s new that doesn’t interest you to find something that might. You can either get a list of new posts delivered to your inbox and click links to explore the ones that interest you or use various techniques to bookmark or subscribe to a feed for the categories (topics) or tags that interest you.

Whatever you decide, don’t be discouraged by the wide range of topics here. If you found this blog, it’s likely because there was something here you liked. There may be more now and in the future. Any of these techniques will help you keep on top of what’s new.

Comments Turned Off and On

WordPress turns off commenting; I turn it back on.

Speech bubble

Long story about how I discovered it, so I won’t go into that here. What I discovered is that one of the recent WordPress updates turned off commenting for any post more than 28 days old.

This blog has been up and running since October 2003. Although some of the 2,000+ blog posts are so outdated that they really shouldn’t be commented on (and, indeed, I occasionally delete the ones that have no relevance at all anymore), most of them are still relevant in one way or another. Why turn off comments for them?

This is the second time that I caught a WordPress update changing blog settings.

Anyway, I removed the time limit for blog comments so you should be able to comment on any blog post, no matter how old, unless I manually turned off comments for that post. Remember, comments are moderated, although many regular readers/commenters have earned whitelist status and will see their comments appear immediately after posting. Likewise, abusers have been added to a blacklist and their comments never appear.

If you post a comment and don’t see it immediately, have a little patience. I’ve been traveling since December and am occasionally in areas where I can’t get email and monitor website traffic or comments. I eventually get to the comments to respond, approve, or do both for new comments coming in.

About the Video Posts

Why I’m posting a bunch of YouTube videos.

If you’re a regular blog reader, you may have noticed that I haven’t exactly been a regular blog writer lately. Honestly, I’ve been busy.

First there was the yard sale that took two days to set up and two days to sit through. I’m still cleaning up the remains of that. Goodwill is doing very well with my repeated truck drive throughs. Lesson learned: sell items of value on Craig’s list and throw the rest away.

Then rain. Lots of rain. And with the rain, lots of flying. One morning I started at 5 AM. Another evening, I flew over cherry trees until 9 PM, went to the airport for fuel, and didn’t get home until 9:45 PM.

Then a four-day weekend in Leavenworth selling jewelry. Those are long days. Leavenworth is 40 miles from here and I’m gone at least 12 hours each day. When I get home after a day of dealing with tourist shoppers and summer heat, the last thing I want to do is sit in front of a computer to write.

YouTube Logo

And then there’s YouTube. You might recall my post about the FlyingMAir YouTube channel in late May? That’s when I discovered that one of my videos had gone viral and I was actually earning some real money as a content producer. But as anyone in publishing can tell you, you can’t just sit back and expect things to carry on without some additional effort. So I became motivated to build up the channel and see where I can take it.

It’s been about six weeks since that post and I’ve added a lot of new videos to the channel. Some are videos I’d published on my personal channel years ago; I moved them over where they’d get more attention. Others are brand new, created with newly recorded footage.

And it’s paying off. Yesterday my subscriber count topped 50,000. That viral video now has 9.3 million views. I am routinely getting more than 2,000 views in the first 24 hours of all the new videos I publish. And it’s showing in my YouTube earnings, too. Without getting too specific, let’s just say that I have my monthly living expenses covered for a while.

So when faced with the choice of editing and publishing a video that’ll be seen by thousands (or millions?) of people and put money in my bank account or writing a blog post that might be seen by a few hundred people without adding a thing to my bottom line, you can probably figure out which is my first choice.

Sorry.

But there is a silver lining. I’ve decided to blog the videos when they are published on YouTube. Today, I’m playing catch up, adding them to my blog with a post date to match the date they were publishing on YouTube. So if you’re a blog reader who doesn’t necessarily surf YouTube, you can see them on an ongoing basis.

And yes, I promise to finish my blog post series about my spring vacation on the David B. It might just take a while.

Blog Problems Resolved

It looks like I’ve finally fixed the Home page issues here.

Back in March, my blog started acting weird. I’d post something new and it wouldn’t show up on the Home page for everyone. It showed up for me, though. At least sometimes.

Permalink Settings
Permalink settings for my WordPress blog.

Then I started having issues with the permalinks. You see, WordPress (the blogging platform I use) stores all of its content in a database. Blog pages don’t exist as regular HTML pages like a regular Website. They’re generated on the fly as needed. The permalink is a formulated URL that brings up a specific blog post or other content. For some reason, my permalinks insisted on including a double slash (//) after the domain name. When I tried to restore them to my preferred format (www.aneclecticmind.com/year/month/day/post-name), my blog would cease working.

This was driving me nuts because I couldn’t figure it out for myself and because I was traveling extensively and simply couldn’t take the time to troubleshoot it with my hosting company. When I got home from traveling, I tried once or twice to get it resolved and failed.

I tried again when I was in Ketchikan last week with my laptop and a few hours to spare. My ISP, Bluehost, escalated it up to Tier 3d. Someone did something and they fixed the permalink issue — although they did set it incorrectly. I corrected it today and it “stuck” without causing the whole blog to come crashing down.

But the Home page refresh issue continued to rear its ugly head. I posted two blog posts earlier today — one as a test and the other to get some half-finished content online. Two individual people contacted me to tell me that the post appeared at the link provided on Twitter but not the Home page. I checked and found the same thing.

I logged in to make sure the posts hadn’t been somehow deleted. They were there. I went to the Home page and they appeared. As they should.

I logged out and checked again. They were gone. The most recent post that appeared was the one I’d written back on March 8.

What the hell?

I called Bluehost to set up another ticket. It took a few tries for the support guy to duplicate the problem. He was certain it was related to caching.

I used to use a caching app to speed up the site. The tech support folks had told me that it might be causing the Permalink issue so I deleted it.

The Bluehost guy couldn’t fix this issue, but he promised to open a ticket and move it up to Tier 2. I thanked him and hung up.

I was unhappy. I like to blog. I’ve been blogging here since 2003 — 16 years in October. There were a lot of things I wanted to say, a lot of stories I wanted to share about my recent travels. I can’t add new content to my blog if my blog isn’t working right.

So I rolled up my sleeve and started poking around in the WordPress files that aren’t in the database. I found a cache folder. Inside the cache folder was a folder named all. That folder was full of numbered folders, including some that corresponded to years and, within them, months. Just like WordPress organizes my post permalinks. There was also an index.html file. I opened it up and guess what I found? The home page that kept appearing for people who weren’t logged in.

I called Bluehost tech support again. Of course, I couldn’t talk to the same guy. The guy I got wasn’t quite as knowledgeable. I told him about the problem and what I’d found. I asked him if he thought I could delete the all folder. He didn’t think that would be a good idea. How about renaming it? Sure. I could always restore the name.

So I renamed all to _all. And I went back to the Home page of my blog. And it properly displayed my most recent post at the top of the Home page.

I asked him to look at it. It showed him the same thing.

I got on Twitter and asked my followers to try it and report back. A handful of them did. It was working right for them, too.

Problem solved.

I deleted the _all folder and everything still works fine. Then I reinstalled a highly recommended cache plugin and turned it on. Still fine.

So at this point, my blog seems to be mostly fixed.

I say mostly because I need to update WordPress to the most recent version and I can’t because the whole blog is running on an old version of PHP and I can’t seem to update it. That already has a Bluehost ticket in Tier 2 going.

Why can’t things be simple?

Yes, I’m Still Alive

I realize that it’s been more than a month since my last blog post. I’m not happy about that. And after getting an email message from a concerned reader today, I thought I’d take a moment to apologize.

Truth is, I’ve been very busy and, although I’ve got plenty to write about, I haven’t made time to write. Now I’m on vacation (leaving my home, chickens, and barn cats in the very capable hands of a house sitter who is probably eating eggs 3 times a day by now) and I purposely left my laptop behind. I can’t write long form on my iPad, so a real blog post will just have to wait a little longer.

In the meantime, I’ll try to use my new phone to share some vacation “postcards.” (I’ll set the publication date and time to approximate when I took the photos, so some posts might appear older than this one.)

Gotta run! Here’s my train!

Metro Train coming into station

This Silver Line Metro train will take me a good portion of the way to the Air & Space Museum in Chantilly, VA.