Tag Archives: blogging

My Vlog

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I brush the dust off my personal YouTube channel for use as a vlog.

I began posting videos to YouTube on my personal YouTube channel way back in 2007. Back then — as today — the videos were mostly short clips I used to share things going on in my life. I guess I used it a lot like folks use TikTok today. (And no, I don’t have a TikTok channel or any desire to get one.)

The cool thing about putting content on YouTube for so many years is that I can look back at my life and what was going on. Some of those posts are better than blog entries because they show more than they tell. (If you’re a writer, you should understand the value of that.) I find special value in the posts that highlight things in progress, like the building of my new home or the development of my cats from kittens to full grown barn cats. Just the other day I watched a video from 2015 where I noticed the tree I’d found growing in one of my planters; not long afterward, I’d replanted that tree in my yard and it’s now more than 30 feet tall. (No kidding!)

Although I put a lot of time, energy, and money into the FlyingMAir YouTube Channel, I pretty much neglect the Maria Langer YouTube channel. There are only so many hours in a day and these days I have little desire to spend my time in front of a computer. I’ll be frank: the FlyingMAir channel earns me money through ad revenue and memberships; the Maria Langer channel does not. The FlyingMAir channel has nearly 70K subscribers; the Maria Langer channel does not. In my shoes, where would you put your time?

But I’ve recently decided I want to do more vlogging — video blogging. While lots of folks seem to consider the content on the FlyingMAir channel to be “vlogs,” I don’t. To me, a vlog is more personal and less edited. It might take me hours to video, store, back up, edit, render, and upload a 30-minute flying video. I think a vlog entry should be looser and more spontaneous. It should be something I can create quickly with my phone as the camera. Something that shares what’s on my mind or what’s right in front of me at a specific moment. Something I can upload quickly, perhaps minutes after I record it. Or maybe even while it’s going on, as a livestream.


I posted this on Twitter yesterday, but I sure wish I’d slowed down and shared it live.

What kind of content would I livestream? Well, yesterday morning, I woke to find a blanket of snow covering my entire area. It was absolutely gorgeous. But what was even more amazing was the way the sunlight hit those snowcapped peaks as the sun came up. That’s the kind of thing that’s great to share live and save for future viewing.

And how about when the bighorn sheep return to the neighborhood, as they’re likely to do within the next month or so? I’d love to create a livestream where I answer questions about them while videoing them grazing in my yard. (There actually is a livestream of this on the FlyingMAir YouTube channel; the only way to livestream it was to put it on a channel where it really didn’t belong.)

And right now, because the temperature is around freezing, the wind machines in the area are running. I’d love to share a live view of them in action, answering viewer questions as I record the sound.

That’s the kind of content that interests me. The stuff that’s going on now, the stuff I can share live with others who might have questions or comments about it. Interactive video content that doesn’t rely on editing to be interesting. Something short and sweet.

The trouble is, with fewer than 1000 subscribers on my personal channel, I can’t enable the mobile device live-streaming feature. I can only livestream from a laptop or desktop — and who the hell wants to see my talking head, especially with a view that’s likely to look up my nose?

So that brings me to a request. Can those of you reading this who have Google/Gmail/YouTube accounts go to my channel and subscribe? As I type this, I’m only 85 subscribers short of being able to turn on mobile device live-streaming. You can be one of those 85 subscribers! Three easy steps:

  1. Go here: https://www.youtube.com/c/MariaLanger/
  2. Click the Subscribe button.
  3. To be notified when there’s new content, click the bell icon to run on notifications.

And even if you don’t want to subscribe, I urge you to take a moment to check out the channel and some of the videos you’ll find there. They cover a wide range of topics and I’m pretty sure that if you like this blog, you’ll find at least a few short videos that you’l also enjoy.

Oh, and if you’re a Twitter user, follow me on Twitter. I might not tweet a lot of stuff, but most of it is personal and blog-like. After all, Twitter began as a microblogging platform and that’s still how I use it.

The Seasonality of My Blog Posts

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What you find on the home page varies depending on the time of year.

A few months ago, I was thinking about how I never blog about flying anymore. But a quick look at the home page and you’d think that flying is the only thing I blog about. What gives?

I realized that my blogging habits are seasonal.

  • Oregon Coast
    I managed to get one trip in before cherry season started: I took the helicopter down to Oregon for some maintenance and spent some time on the cloudy coast with my pups.

    In the winter, when I’m traveling and have limited access to the Internet, I often share quick “postcards” that feature photos of places I’ve been. Occasionally, I’ll do a deep dive into a topic on my mind that time of year. In recent years, I’ve been making and selling jewelry on my travels so I write about doing shows, finding supplies, and learning new techniques.

  • In the spring, after I’ve returned home, I write about springtime topics. Although I love traveling, after 3+ months on the road, I’m usually very glad to be home. I write about the remnants of winter, the weather, and the chores I need to do to get my garden and home ready for the time of year when I’m there.

  • Weird camera Angle
    One of the things I’m excited about lately is the GoPro Fusion camera I recently acquired. It makes interactive 360° videos, which have been a real hit on FlyingMAir YouTube channel. Here’s a screen grab from a recent video — isn’t this a cool angle?

    In the summer, when cherry drying season is underway, I write a lot about helicopters and flying. After all, that’s what’s on my mind. I also dial up my video production for the FlyingMAir YouTube channel, which is quickly becoming a decent source of revenue to help cover my flying costs. Flying helicopters ain’t cheap and I occasionally whine a bit about that, too. I might also write about new cameras or video editing tools I use to get that work done.

  • In autumn, when cherry season is over and no longer have to stick around the house waiting for rain, I eventually hit the road on some sort of autumn vacation. Last year I did a photography cruise in the San Juan Islands, but this year the plan is to go to Alaska; I already got a good deal on First Class plane tickets to get there. When I’m not traveling, I’m prepping my home and garden for the winter and starting to pack for my winter travels, so I sometimes blog about that.

Keep in mind that the busier I am, the less I write in my blog. Sometimes I’m very busy. Other times, I might not be especially busy but I could simply be burned out. Remember, I’ve been blogging here since October 2003 — getting close to 20 years now! Maybe I’m just running out of things to say.

Morel Mushroom
Here’s a morel mushroom I found in mid-May. I hunt for morels in spring and chanterelles in autumn.

I think I blog less now than I did years ago because I’m more active now than I was earlier in my life. I have freedoms now that I didn’t have when I was with my wasband, a man who had limited vacation time and didn’t like me having fun without him. I also have a lot more personal time to learn new things (for example, beekeeping in 2013, gyro piloting in 2014, mushroom hunting in 2016, jewelry making in 2018 and 2019) and build new skills (for example, basic carpentry in 2014; acting as the general contractor on the construction of my home, wiring my home and tiling my bathroom floor and shower stall wall in 2014 and 2015; jewelry scale metalworking in 2018). I do as I please and I do a lot. Who has time to blog?

What does all this mean to blog readers? Well, all it really means is that this blog’s focus will shift with the seasons. It’s summer now, so I’ll be writing a lot about flying and sharing lots of my videos. If the virus situation improves, I hope to get out to do at least one or two jewelry shows and I’ll likely write about that. And, keeping this in mind, I’ll do my best to write about things other than flying when they’re on my mind.

You might even get another political rant out of me. 😉

Comments Turned Off and On

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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.

Blog Problems Resolved

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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

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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.