Tag Archives: WordPress

Five Years Blogging

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How time flies.

Yesterday, while I was busy working — yes, I do work, too — I missed a major milestone in my writing life: my fifth anniversary as a blogger.

I latched on to blogging very early. I saw it for how it was originally intended, as a “Web log” or journal. I’d been wanting to keep a journal of my life and thoughts but could never stick with it. By blogging these things, I put it out there for feedback from others. With an audience, I felt a good reason to write these journal entries. I kept it up.

For five years.

I started blogging on October 15, 2003 with an offline blogging tool called iBlog. I’d use it to compose blog entries offline. When it was time to publish, iBlog would generate all the HTML necessary to create all of the pages for the blog. Publishing was time-consuming, especially as the blog grew in size. It was published to my .Mac disk space and co-existed with my Web site.

In 2004, when I went up to the Grand Canyon to fly helicopter tours, I found it necessary to start a new blog so I could blog from my laptop. This was a shortcoming of iBlog and it soon drove me nuts. Later the same year, I found a way to synchronize my two blogs back into one.

In December 2005, I finally saw the light and switched to WordPress. While I was brave enough to install it on my own Mac OS X Server — and even got it to work! — server problems convinced me to move it to a hosting service. It’s been there, running smoothly, ever since.

All this time, I’d been blogging about whatever I felt like. This included the kinds of “days in my life” posts you find here, as well as how-to articles I wrote for the readers of my computer books. But in November 2007, I decided to split off all the computer articles into their own blog-based site called Maria’s Guides. There was a lot of technical tasks required to pull that off without 404 errors, but I think I did a good job. Sadly, I’ve been neglecting Maria’s Guides a bit lately. I’d rather think — and write — about other things.

That brings us pretty close to today. My blog continues to chug along on the Internet, with me at the helm. I enjoy the ability to say what I want in a forum where others can read and comment on it. I enjoy the interaction with most (but admittedly not all) readers. I find it amazing when certain posts become extremely popular. For example, “Flying At Lake Powell” has been read nearly 19,000 times since it was written in April 2006 and “Cynical Humor” — which is based on content sent to me by a friend — was read more than 2,000 times just the other day. Other blog posts have resulted in a chain of comments which add valuable information to the original post. “The Helicopter Job Market,” which has been read over 18,000 times and has collected 75 comments so far, is a good example.

So yesterday, with no fanfare at all, the fifth anniversary of my first blog post came and went. If it weren’t for a recent reader comment that my blog is “as big as the Grand Canyon,” I would have forgotten this milestone completely. But the comment made me think.

It should be big. I’ve been at it for five years.

Not a Blogger? Maybe You Should Be!

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If you read blogs, you can blog, too.

One of the hats I wear is the Webmaster hat for wickenburg-az.com. This is a Web site I started back in 1999 to provide information of interest to Wickenburg residents and visitors. A few years back, I converted it from straight HTML to a blog-based system utilizing WordPress. This makes it very easy to add new content, automatically archives old content by topic, and adds a great search feature.

wickenburg-az.com is a place for folks to share their own content. I have a number of regular contributors, as well as a few folks who just send new content for consideration when they have something to say.

Yesterday, I received two new submissions — a record for a single day. One was a piece by a woman — we’ll call her Jackie — who was deeply offended by something John McCain said in an Interview with Sarah Palin and Katie Couric. She wrote a short article that explained her views. I could tell by reading it that it was something she’d thought about, something that bothered her a lot. She wasn’t a Democrat latching onto yet another Republican faux pas to prove that Republicans weren’t fit to be in office. I got the feeling that she’d been a McCain supporter who felt betrayed by his recent behavior. This comment he’d made was the last straw.

I couldn’t put the article on wickenburg-az.com. Although the site does cover politics, it concentrates on politics at a much more local level. (Heaven knows that the politics in Wickenburg has enough scandal, cronyism, and blatant favoritism to keep us busy.) So I wrote to Jackie, told her that we couldn’t use it, and suggested that she submit it to the newspapers.

Jackie responded to say that she had and that no one seemed interested in printing it. She thanked me for my response — I may have been the only person to extend that simple courtesy.

That got me thinking…I’ve been blogging for nearly five full years now. (My first blog post was on October 15, 2003.) I’ve used my blog to share everything from boring stories from my life to opinions about politics and religion. If I have something to say, I say it here. I don’t try to submit it to newspapers or other Web sites. I have my own publishing outlet and you’re reading it: An Eclectic Mind.

So I wrote back to Jackie and suggested that she start her own blog.

Those of you who think there’s some kind of computer programming knowledge required to start and run a blog are seriously mistaken. If you have the equipment and skills to find and read a blog post on someone else’s blog, you have everything you need to start your own. Best of all, there are plenty of free blogging tools and services out there. My personal favorite is WordPress. Although I use the WordPress server installation, which does require an above average amount of computer know-how, WordPress.com is a free service that just about anyone can use.

Why haven’t I mentioned this before? Well, it’s mostly because I thought everyone already knew this. It wasn’t until I began this e-mail exchange with Jackie that I realized that there are people out there with something to say and no easy public outlet in which to say it. Blogging fills this purpose for me. Why can’t it fill this purpose for others?

Are you someone like Jackie? Someone with something to say to the world and no place to say it? Consider blogging.

Lynda.com WordPress CoverAnd at the risk of turning this into a commercial — which is not my intent — I invite you to check out the free sample lessons from the WordPress.com video I created for the folks at lynda.com. There’s enough there to introduce you to blogging so you can find out whether blogging is for you. There are also free lessons that cover the WordPreess.com setup process. That’ll get you started. WordPress isn’t difficult to use, so there’s a very good chance you won’t even need training material. (But if you do, I can’t say enough nice things about lynda.com materials.)

Blogging has become an important part of my life. It gives me an outlet to communicate what I’m doing and thinking to the world. So what if only a few hundred people read each blog post? I’m not writing for them as much as I’m writing for myself — to get what’s in my head out where it can be read by others.

Isn’t that what Jackie was trying to do when she submitted her article to wickenburg-az.com?

I’m Not MIA

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Just away on a business trip, working 14-hour days.

And no, I’m not complaining. They put me in a hotel on the harbor with about 1,000 boats right out my window. Today, I walked from my hotel room to the ocean, then had a fresh seafood dinner that I did not share with seagulls. On the way back to my room, I watched a great blue heron pluck a fish out of the water and swallow it.

Nope. No complaints here.

Anyway, I’m working on a WordPress-related project and, to do so, I had to find a bunch of sample WordPress blogs. One of them is just too funny not to share: Sir Satire’s Weblog. Don’t hesitate — go there right now and read it. It’s hilarious. Like another version of The Onion.

For example, today’s blog post is titled “Tax on human gas emissions gains support in Congress” begins:

A tax on human gas emissions has gained the support of at least one member of Congress, but critics are blasting the proposal and say that its proponents are just full of hot air.

Proponents of the “flatutax,” as it has been dubbed by critics, say that human emissions are often overlooked when discussing global warming issues. Human beings contribute greenhouse gases to the atmosphere during the digestive process, they say, and a tax would provide an incentive to curb those emissions.

Get the idea? Funny stuff!

Are you still here? You’re not going to read anything more interesting here, at least for a few days. Go on over and check out Sir Satire. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.