Tag Archives: blogging

Great Loop 2021 Gets Its Own Website

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I copy all of my Great Loop 2021 posts to a new website where I’ll be publishing all posts about the trip from now on.

I’ve been posting to this blog since 2003 and, over the years, it has accumulated thousands of posts. If you know me, you know that I have a lot to say. This blog makes it easy for me to get the things on my mind off my mind so I can think about other things. It also offers a sort of journal of the things I’m up to — something I can turn back to in the future to see what was going on in my life.

And I’ll admit it: I keep this blog more for myself than for readers. Regular readers come and go but I remain.

Long ago, when I was writing a lot of computer how-to books, I broke out the content related to those books and put them into their own website. It was Maria’s Guides for a while and Langer Books for a while and I think it even ended up in Flying M Productions for a while. Those sites (and my support for those old books) are gone. The content is around somewhere, but it simply isn’t worth maintaining websites for it.

I’m hoping that’s not the case with the first new blog I’ve created in more than 10 years: My Great Loop Adventure.

I bought the domain name a few months ago when I first started seriously thinking about doing the Great Loop. I set it up but didn’t really have the motivation to give it a nice design or the “branding” that everyone expects. Frankly, I didn’t have the creativity to do it myself or budget to hire someone else. Since I didn’t think it was attractive enough to share, I kept it under wraps.

In the meantime, I kept blogging about the Great Loop and my upcoming trip here.

One of the big “rules” for bloggers — back when blogging was a big thing and people bothered to share advice about it — is to keep your blog focused on one topic. That is impossible for me. I have too many interests and blog about too many things. Did I really want to maintain a dozen or more blogs just so that each one could be focused on a single topic?

The answer was no, mostly because of another rule: add new content to your blog frequently. I definitely did not want to write and publish a dozen (or more) new posts a week, which would be the minimum to keep the blogs alive. So I continued to publish about all of my interests in one blog.

The problem with that is this: if someone is interested about just one of the topics I write about, he might have to wade through weeks of uninteresting (to him) posts to find one that does interest him. And let’s face it; no one is really motivated enough to make a bookmark for a single topic (category) or tag on the site, although that would definitely solve the interest problem.

Great Loop cruising is a relatively new thing for me, however, and I want to reach as many fellow loopers as possible. The best way to do that would be to collect all of my Great Loop related posts in one blog.

And since I’ll actually be starting my partial Great Loop trip as a crew member on a 27 foot Ranger Tug on Tuesday, I expect to blog about my trip at least once a day. That’s a lot of new blog posts — far more than non-boaters want to see on this blog.

So yesterday, I copied all of the existing posts in the Great Loop 2021 series and republished them with their original publication dates on the new blog. (I left them here so links to them wouldn’t break.) And then I spent far too much time fine-tuning the blog’s layout and appearance to make it presentable. And I linked it to my Twitter account so my Twitter followers could still see the new posts as they were released.

Great Loop Website
Here’s what the My Great Loop Adventure website looks like now. I said it was “presentable,” not a work of art. If you have any interest in donating some design skills for a banner or custom icons, I’m ready for them.

At this point, I’m ready to stop blogging about my upcoming Great Loop trip here. I may, however, continue to blog about my boat shopping progress and other things of general interest to boaters.

I did make one change to this blog to help readers find new content on the new blog: I added a link to the RSS feed for My Great Loop Adventure to the sidebar. That widget will show clickable links to the most recent five blog posts there, as well as a link to that blog.

If you’re interested in new content about the Great Loop, I urge you to subscribe to that blog. You’ll get notified every time a new post comes out. (And, of course, you can unsubscribe at any time; your email address won’t be sold, etc., etc.)

And if you haven’t subscribed to my personal YouTube channel, please do. That’s where you’ll see the videos I create on the trip; I’m hoping to release a few every week, including more than a few from my drone, which is coming along on the ride.

How to Follow Just the Content You Want on This Blog

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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.

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.