Tag Archives: blogging

Ah! Something to Write About!

Posted on by
Comment

I find a Web site that offers weekly suggestions for blogging topics.

A little over a month ago, a Twitter friend (@desertlibrarian) tweeted about an hysterically funny blog post she’d read on John Scalzi‘s blog, Whatever. This led me to subscribing to the RSS feed for Whatever. Scalzi’s apparently a hardcore SciFi author and although I enjoy some SciFi now and then, I’ve never read any of his books. (He’s probably never read any of my books, either.) His blog posts about SciFi don’t interest me very much (sorry!), but his thoughtful and well-written commentaries about other things — such as the Creation Museum — make it well worth keeping the feed subscription.

It seems that Mr. Scalzi had been keeping another blog or site that featured a “Weekend Assignment.” Here’s his summary of that feature from a recent post on Whatever:

For those of you who used to read By The Way, you’ll know that every Thursday I wrote up a “Weekend Assignment” to give folks something to do with their blogs over the weekend (Friday – Sunday, for AOL Journals, was typically the time period in which the members posted the least). I’m not doing the Weekend Assignments anymore, but I’ve bequeathed the activity to Karen Funk Blocher (aka Mavarin), and she’s doing them on her blog now. The first of her Weekend Assignments is up, and it’s asking what people are doing with their time in the wake of the WGA strike.

It seems like just yesterday that I wrote an almost pointless blog post about how much trouble I sometimes had finding something to write about. And then I find this.

So, if you’ll pardon me, I’ve got something to write.

What to Write About?

Posted on by
2

The hardest part about blogging — for me, anyway — is coming up with a topic worth writing about.

I’m a writer and have been since my early teens. So it’s easy for me to write. It’s easy to take an idea and communicate it to others using words, sentences, and paragraphs.

The problem I have is coming up with ideas to write about.

What to Write About?

Sure, I can write about what happened to me yesterday. But is it interesting? Barely. (For the record, I woke up late after being up for 2 hours in the middle of the night, spent some time messing around with some GTD (“Getting Things Done”) software that’s supposed to help me be more productive, ordered pizza for my local helicopter mechanic and a few other pilots, hosted a pizza party at my friend’s hangar (which is insulated and has amenities such as a latte machine and leather sofa), and came back home to waste some more time with the same GTD software (which wasn’t working as advertised) thus not getting much else done.)

I can also write about the things I think about, which can be more interesting when I’ve had time to fully develop my thoughts. Lately, I’ve been thinking about politics, but I don’t feel well informed enough to blog about my thoughts. I’ve also been thinking about the English as the official language issue, but I haven’t finished thinking about it — or reached a stage where I’m ready to write. I’ve been thinking about the pitfalls of living in a town that’s trying to be something it’s not — which is also something that it wasn’t when I moved here — but why waste my time preaching about something that no one cares about?

Why I Blog

I like to start each morning with a blog post. I sit at the kitchen table with my coffee and my laptop and write about whatever comes to mind.

I find this therapeutic. I’m taking my organized thoughts and recording them where I — and others — can read them again and again. Or perhaps I’m taking unorganized thoughts and organizing them as I get them out.

It doesn’t matter to me whether people read what I write. I blog primarily for myself. (Remember, blog is short for Web log and my blog is a personal journal.)

While it’s always nice to have readers who comment to say that they like what I’ve written or add some information I hadn’t known or considered, getting readers or reader participation is not my primary goal. It’s the head-clearing aspect of blogging. Getting it out of my head and onto…well, not exactly paper, but something that’s just as “permanent” and accessible.

Unpublished Blog Posts

Sometimes I’ll start a blog post and never finish it. It’ll remain as a draft on my computer’s hard disk, waiting for future attention it may never get. This isn’t as good as publishing a blog post. That’s not because publishing is the goal. It’s because completion of the thought is the goal and an uncompleted blog post represents an unfinished thought.

I can also assume, when I don’t finish a blog post, is that I didn’t have enough to write about when I began it.

Full Circle

Which brings me full circle with this blog post.

The topic was the lack of topics. And I proved a lack of topics by writing a blog post that didn’t really cover anything in enough detail to make it worth reading.

Have I just wasted my time? It appears so.

Have I wasted yours? Please accept my apologies.

Message from a Reader

Posted on by
1

This is the kind of crap I put up with.

Some people really need to get a life. Like this guy, Mike, who took time out of what must be a very boring existence to write me this e-mail:

Look, you and people like you have got to STOP spreading crap like your mouse story around. Seriously, I understand your point of view and if I got to to fly a helicopter around when I wanted to I may adopt your point of view. The problem is that 99% of us DON’T!!!

It matters not what you write… whether it’s a novel or just get up on your soapbox and subletly tell others there moral duty in an internet story about mice. Some responsiblilty should be utilized.

I (and others like me) can not shuttle these vermin to an estate in the GC!! In fact, many suffer disease and health problems from these little bastards, myself included. Remeber the plauge???

Please think of the consiquences of your words.

Seems to me as though you are already full of shit.

Wow. For someone who doesn’t care, he certainly seems to care.

Amazing how a simple post about mice can get a guy so riled up. I guess he really hates the little critters. He should get a job as an exterminator.

Normally, I just delete crap like this. But this one was so spectacular with its exclamation points and question marks and misspellings that I just had to share it with the 1% of readers (by his estimate) who actually do care.

And if anyone reading this agrees with Mike, here’s a solution for you: stop reading this blog. Because no matter how much hate mail you send me, I’m going to write whatever the hell I want to here.

The Gravatars Are Back!

Posted on by
1

I add gravatars back to this site in a big way.

imageBefore I redesigned this blog, back in the days when it was still Maria Langer: The Official Web Site*, I added gravatars to the comments section of the blog. Gravatars are icons or avatars of individuals that are linked to their e-mail addresses. When someone with a gravatar posted a comment using his e-mail address in the appropriate field, the gravatar would automatically appear with the comment. If the gravatar changed in the future, it would also change on this site. Here’s what mine currently looks like.

This feature works with any site run by someone geeky enough to take the time and effort to set it up. With WordPress, it doesn’t take much time to do. Just the willingness to install and activate a simple plugin and modify some code in the comments.php file for the blog’s theme.

One of the reasons it took me so long to get this set back up was that I’m one of the few commenters who has a gravatar. I got a little tired of seeing [mostly] my face in the comments. It didn’t seem as if many other people were interested in this personalization feature.

Then Automattic (makers of WordPress) purchased Gravatar. I figured it would be more supported. And I was right. The Get Recent Comments plugin I use to list recent comments in the sidebar of An Eclectic Mind and Maria’s Guides support them. So I decided to enable that feature. From there, it took only moments to go the next step and put the gravatars back in the comments themselves.

So now it’s fully implemented on both of my main Web sites. And I’m encouraging people to go to Gravatar.com and get their own gravatars. And if you need help doing that, check out “How to Create a Gravatar” on Maria’s Guides.

I’ll be looking for your gravatars in the Comments of both sites.

* Read with tongue planted firmly in cheek.

Two Blogs? Again?

Posted on by
2

After over a year of soul-searching, I decide to spin off my book support topics to their own site.

I built my first Web site back in the mid 1990s. It was a simple site, created in HTML, that provided information about me and my books.

A [Very] Brief History of my Web Site(s)

The Internet was young back then — at least as far as the masses were concerned. Few people surfed. In fact, the whole idea of going online was so new and radical back then that my first book proposal, which was about telecommunications on a Mac, was turned down because publishers felt that there wouldn’t be enough people interested in it.

Anyway, as things heated up, I soon saw the benefits of putting more information on the Web. And then, in 2003, I discovered blogging. Surely my personal blog should be separate from what I write to support my books and articles, right? So I spun off a new site, LangerBooks.com, and published plain HTML Web pages with book promotional and support information.

Meanwhile, I fell in love with the whole blogging interface. There was no question in my mind: a blog was a perfect tool for presenting new content while automatically archiving old content. So I got LangerBooks.com into a blog format, with a separate blog for each title.

Back in those days (2003-2004), it wasn’t easy for me. I’d decided to blog with a program called iBlog that had a lot of promise. Unfortunately, its author wasn’t willing or able to keep up with technology. His software generated static HTML documents for each page of a blog. The more you wrote, the more cumbersome the whole blog updating process became. And, as those of you who read this blog regularly know, I can write an awful lot.

So in January 2005, I made the jump to WordPress. It was a big jump indeed, since I knew absolutely nothing about PHP or MySQL and very little about CSS. (What made it even bigger was that I was hosting my own blog on my own server.) I learned what I needed to know. One of the best things about WordPress is that you don’t need to know much to build a really professional looking site.

Around the same time, I decided that I didn’t want to maintain separate blogs for my books. So I brought all the books back under aneclecticmind.com and came up with some creative ways to keep Book Support topics separate from the rest of the site. Creative, yes. Effective, perhaps.

One Blog to Rule them All?

Of course, the whole time I was doing this, I was reading from “pro bloggers” about how important it is to keep your blog on just one topic. These guys were blogging to make money, I argued to myself. They weren’t in it because of a need to blog or a desire to provide additional information to book readers. So I pretty much ignored them.

But their advice was eating away at my brain in the back of my mind. After much thought, I realized that having too many widespread topics in my blog was preventing the blog from being more popular. For example, people interested in my flying and lifestyle posts — which, according to a poll on my site, is about 30% of the site’s visitors — were probably bored silly with my Mac OS and Excel and WordPress posts. And people interested in getting book support (16% of visitors) weren’t interested in wading through the other content to get the bits of information that could help them. This was preventing me from getting more site subscribers and regular readers.

So about two weeks ago, I decided to make the split.

Drumroll, Please

The question of how I did it is something I can discuss as a WordPress-related post. Let’s just say that I’ve done the basic work and have enough content in the new blog to open it to the public.

So here’s the formal announcement:

Support for my books and articles can now be found at the Maria’s Guides Web site: http://www.mariasguides.com/.

If you’re reading this post there, you’ve already found it. Otherwise, if you’re interested in articles, tips, and downloads related to my books about Mac OS, Excel, Word, and WordPress, please go check it out.

And yes, occasionally there will be cross posts, like this one. But I’ll try to keep that to a minimum.

Why Maria’s Guides?

A few years back, I made a false start on a line of eBooks. I abandoned the project, primarily because I got busy with other things that were more interesting (and lucrative). I’m thinking of revisiting the idea with shorter eBooks covering a wider range of topics. Maria’s Guides was the working title of the series and I own the domain name, so why not?