Tag: blogging

I miss blogging

I’ve been writing this post in my head for something like 2 or 3 months, but that’s just how difficult sitting down to post has become. And it’s one of the reasons I miss being here.

I know it’s an odd sentiment. We’re about to enter the year 2014. Even Jason Kottke declared the blog dead. Everybody prefers Facebook and twitter and tumblr and other sites missing capital letters and vowels and… common decency. And the realty is, if I want to blog all I have to do is log in and write something. There’s even a few posts from this very year proving that the capability is still very much mine.

But it goes beyond that. Over the past few months I started paying attention to the spiral downward of one of my previous favorite bloggers and it started to bother me. Not that I felt sorry for her situation – she clearly has brought it upon herself. Rather the fact that it’s all come to this… does that even make sense?

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I actually miss the community and activity that revolved around blogging. Whether someone became famous or was just a guy across the Internet, there was a connection – many connections in fact – that could be made. Ads were a way to pay for hosting and branding was strictly for corporations. Bloggers (and readers) were excited to unveil new designs and every comment had the potential to start something.

At this point I’m obviously babbling. The thoughts were probably coherent weeks ago and instead it’s all just trickling out in little snippets. I’m not saying that posts galore will soon follow this vapid filler, but simply trying to convey the notion that the move away from individual blogs towards the insipid little blurbs that find their way to Facebook or the witty but hollow tweets and constant re-posting on other sites makes me sad.

Argh. Anyway, let’s just say that in the coming year I’d like to communicate more. Maybe that’s here. Maybe it’s over the phone. Maybe it’s via physical letters. Whatever the method, I need to find the connections that I used to find via this site.

Hope you had a good year and the next one is even better.

Week in, week out

I started February rather well. I was writing everyday. There were these ideas in my head. Those ideas became words. Those words were put to paper… er… keyboard. The keyboard… alright, this isn’t working. Anyway, I had unofficially decided to go for a post every day. By the 5th day I was too busy during the day and too tired at night – big shock, eh? Inevitably my idea to just skip a day soon turned into the typical week and then some hiatus.

No biggie, it’s not like I have that many people check here on a regular basis. But the point has always been to write – whether here or elsewhere.

You may have noticed on Tweethead or Friendface, I’ve posted some links over to certain articles on The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. If you actually bothered to follow those, you might have realized that they were written by me. That’s right, I’m now on another site, too. But unlike my failed/abandoned music blog, it’s life does not rely solely on me, therefore it’s likely to survive the week.

You see, my friend Chris (he of the aforementioned Gray Flannel Fame) asked me a ways back if I’d be interested in writing for him. Initially there was some scoffing, seeing as how my own blogs demanded so many words I couldn’t possibly spare any. But as time went on and my annual music posts weren’t really building any traffic I figured, why the hell not? While there are still designs in my head regarding a second failure at a solo music blog, nothing says I can’t review something for his site while continuing to babble incoherently on mine. HE DOESN’T OWN ME!

Where was I? Oh yeah, if you get a chance, check out my recent review for the new Iron & Wine, it’s pure genius (the album that is, the review is pure dreck). Hopefully I’ll get a new review up there at least once a month so Chris doesn’t keep harassing me. And in between perhaps some effort to lend my witty way with… you know… words to some other topics of interest… note… other things.

Oh yeah, this is going to work out real good…

Believe it or not

I actually made a music post! Is it any good? Who knows, it’s not like I read it…

Is it just me, or does anyone else out there cringe at the thought of reading your own writing? There’s an inherent distrust in the notion that I can do anything that requires some sort of talent. Even though many people have complimented me on my writing, I can only assume that they are being nice. Obviously anything produced by these clattering fingertips could barely resemble coherent English let alone something friends, family or total strangers would find interesting or entertaining.

Self-deprecation can be fun for you, too!

In all seriousness, while I would never actually call myself a good writer it does appear as though I am a natural one. Just like falling off a bicycle, it comes rather easily despite long breaks between efforts. Perhaps shortening those gaps would produce something resembling quality content. At the very least it would produce quantity – and that’s darn close alphabetically speaking!

Anyway I’m trying not to let my indecision with regards to the use of domain names, subdomains, and subfolders get in the way of continued blogging. Isn’t there a cute baby video or something laying around here I could post? This meta-crap is getting old.

Sure… why not?

Call it delusions of grandeur… call it gluttony for punishment… call it whatever you like, I’m going to try my hand at NaBloPoMo again. That’s National Blog Posting Month for those of you with lives.

Since I first failed miserably at this a couple years ago, they’ve changed it to a monthly thing that encourages people to fill the Internet with mindless drivel about what they had for lunch on a daily basis (torilla-encrusted fish-based product for those wondering), but November remains the “official” month.

The real trick will be pushing myself to post earlier in the day. These late night “brainstorming” sessions go no where very slowly. The other trick will be to come up with things to actually write about. But we all know content is purely optional when it comes to the self-indulgence of personal blogging.

This time I even remembered to submit this site for their blogroll – it should now be listed under “general” because “meandering” wasn’t an option. Perhaps the potential threat of random strangers being directed here will be enough to keep me posting. Or perhaps it will simply be enough to make me finally get rid of the CSS that puts those silly blue borders around my photos…

A word on WordPress

Hopefully all of you blogger-types running WordPress have taken note of yesterday’s announcement that version 2.5 has finally been released. I’ve already been running the release candidates since they announced them, so there isn’t a huge change for me on my blogs since the upgrade today (and you, dear readers, will pretty much notice no changes). But I will admit that the interface changes on the admin side are starting to grow on me. It’s not some breathtakingly gorgeous design, but the layout makes more and more sense to me as I use it and seems to be a real improvement over the somewhat cumbersome layout that preceded.

Interestingly, they also redesigned the main WordPress page to mimic some of the design from the new system. It certainly seems more inviting to me. And while I found myself poking around to see what else had changed, this line from the about page popped out at me:

WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes.

I wonder if they realize they’re referring to me? Although this blog has never risen above the “self-absorbed, Internet journal and commentary” site that it started as, I take a little bit of pride in the fact that, with all of the choices I had before me, I picked the one that became the biggest. Even in the olden days of early 2003, the idea of a dynamic system using PHP and MySQL made sense to me. Coupled with an insistence that it be open source, b2 ended up initially powering this site. But development on that was already at a standstill.

That’s why when Matt announced the first release of WordPress (b2 named successor), it was only a matter of 2 days before version 0.70 was running here. Sometimes I get a little sad that I was such an early adopter, but never took advantage of that to get involved. Oh well, I never expected this site to be anything more than a way to communicate with family and friends, so it should come as no surprise that’s all it remains.

Anywho, I just wanted to point out the upgrade for those interested, and to send a “Thank You” to the WordPress team. They helped provide an outlet for my “creativity”… for better or for worse…