Tagging My Fish aka Content

in this, part two of yesterday’s topic, I’ve been Tagged … I’ll be discussing the Questions to do with blog content.

On a totally different topic for a minute, Moggy and I have had a rough beginning to our morning, along with every other resident on Levels Two and Three of our building. No power from 7 a/m to 9.15 a/m. Though we were told beforehand and had prepared–with a thermos of hot water for example–nobody knew that the alarm units in every apartment would be telling us that … “mains supply is interrupted” … every ninety seconds for the duration. This to happen again on Friday. Not much of an imposition, I know. Especially when we were forewarned.

Moggy was so weirded out by this strange un-embodied voice spouting its refrain that she retired to the far corner under the bed and re-appeared only when the lights went back on and the voice was silenced.

What surprised me about this event was how ‘in the moment’ I had to be just because I couldn’t engage some of my early morning routines. At one point I realized that the ‘net’ metaphor I used in the previous post can definitely be applied to routines. Making in this case the routines the net, and the-new-and-interesting-things-to-do the fish. Something like that.

I’m chortling at this point. After last night’s success at ‘prompting’ (explaining to the resident AI to what pic I needed) I wanted to see what the AI (I’ll need to find out its name) made of this … “Smoky furred cat with white underside and white paws, black nose and black lower jaw.” Nothing is the answer. The message was the image could not be found due to network problems. Ri-i-ight. The AI is stumped?

Q2 If your blog was a person, fictional or real, who would it be? I’d have to say my blog would be a fictional person because she’s a digital entity, existing only in bits and bytes and only online. She’s a ghost in the works. One of millions. It’s as crowded in her world as it is in the consensual ‘real’ world.

It does actually surprise me sometimes that we–me and my digital identity–can connect pretty reliably. Part of the reason is probably that WordPress keeps her safe. She doesn’t have to wheel and deal out in the hot hard world of the world wide web.

Although, not too many entities are out there on their own anymore. I’ve certainly noticed a change in my online experiences from when I first got online in approx 1998, in that nearly everybody I want to talk to, is now in some kind of gated community. It’s difficult now to ‘surf the web’ in the free-wheeling and easy way we used to. All the gated communities still provide that for their members but anybody else first has to sign up and often pay down real money.

Q3 What helps you create new content when you need inspiration? This question follows naturally from the previous one. ‘Creating new content’ is writing or photographing, painting, sketching etc about new ideas I happen to trip over. New ideas provide the ‘inspirations’.

Having to pay everywhere makes it harder to find and produce new content. It’s not only $$$ that stop me finding good stuff. Substack, for example, has this full page thing that they flash at me every time I go to read some of my favorite commentators, where I’m supposed to mark three things that I like to read about, and they’ll be able to steer more of the same my way. I’ve been skipping out every time I see it. It’s such a creativity killer to be shunted into the same byways every time I get online.

WordPress, in contrast, has introduced a ‘discovery’ application that I’m happy with, as I’m able to range further into the domain, and have already got a few topics of interest in my stash. Eg, last week I stumbled across an article on ‘hypovolemia’ which is now sitting there brewing. When I find more info about it, I’ll copy and paste that in there too. With four or five points I’ll have plenty to write about.

My Drafts is where I keep my stash of topics I might post about some day. Usually I’ll copy a link and open a new post, and save it in there. I usually have five or six drafts on the go–waiting for more info, energy, and or time. Any that get too old and stale, I’ll delete. Recently, an Apple mobile phone update provided me with a ‘Journal’ app where I’ve also been noting interesting topics.

In my actual life I keep a bunch of journals. Health diary. Art Journal. Dream School. Bosley and Co’s stories. They also all provide me with grist for the inspiration mill. The picture following is from my art journal, it’s a sketch for a larger painting. A sketch is where I try out techniques, perspectives, colors, even the framing is an experiment. Washi tape. I’m showing it unedited.

I’ve Been Tagged …

I’ve been tagged by Violet Ravette in her The Gothic aspiring Writer mode. When I read the questions, I felt bound to try and answer them, as they are quite to the point and “about blogging”, aspects of which I often talk about. However, I’m going to be skipping up and down these questions, several need more thought than I’m prepared to give them right now.

Q1 … How did you come up with your blog name? I could laugh, or I could cry from tooth-gnashing frustration about the URL up there in the address bar. Probably laughing is the better response. For me, my blog name was to be a temporary placeholder thingie while I learned the ropes of setting up a blog in privacy.

I fully expected to be able to change it to something much more appropriate but it was not to be. When I started blogging I did not know the differences between an URL, a domain, a website and website host, and a blog. To my mind, all of them were parts of the same thing and that idea has caused me untold stress.

WordPress terminology/jargon and its concepts are NOT and NEVER clear or translucent, not crystal clear, crystalline, glassy, or unclouded. Concepts are nearly always opaque and cloudy and nearly always need six or ten readings with a glossary at hand before understanding glimmers in the distance. Then I need to try and nail it down before it escapes. Like, rewrite it in my own words.

And I say this from the point of view of a person who learned HTLM (I started with its fourth iteration, back in 2003) and could get a blank screened monitor with a C/- prompt in the top left hand corner to do as it was told.

— — — —

As I was with WordPress for a short time when it first began–so that it already knew me or still knew me when I returned after a long stint with Blogger and then G+. My name and number were still in the system. And by hook or by crook WordPress did not make it possible for me to change my new prospective blog name.

They offered me a whole new URL, meaning a second blog, to be paid for as well. Don’t ask me to explain, it became an immovable barrier, I decided to leave it in the road and walk around it. Mind you, I don’t mind the name so much, it is after all the handle I mostly go by. It’s the number. — 385131918. I mean, what can you do with that? Don’t try, I’ve already looked at it in 55 different ways.

That left me the tag-line to do glorious things with. 3 realities. The everyday consensual. The Eleven Islands. The future. I don’t now recommend specifying a place in a tag-line. The blog will change in flavor and suddenly the tag-line is dated. But … Lodestar is primarily set in the Eleven Islands and therefore the tag-line is still current. Still, expect to say a change up there one day soon.

Q5 … Is there anything more you wish you had, or would like to learn as a blogger? I must confess I laughed when I read this question. Who invented this tag? This looks so much like market research. There are always more ways I would like to learn to make my blog more interesting. But I figure that since I am mainly talking to other bloggers, anything new I learn other people might be interested in learning too. Or they might be interested to read that the way they did it, was better.

And then there is the concept of learning by doing. So I’m in the process of learning the intricacies of making and embedding video clips which efforts can be seen in the Cat Diary, as well as the ongoing process of turning an image-rich document into a pdf, as will one day soon be seen in the Bosley’s Builders series.

Every so often I go through the WordPress Blocks Catalogue, and see if anything tickles my fancy. I’ve been thinking I should learn how to do a quote block soon. Should be pretty easy, but in my experience as soon as you say that, something hard will trip me up. In my family, I’m famous for making easy things hard, and seeing problems that no one else has even noticed.

Q6 … Do you have a specific style of blogging? Mmm, a specific style? Well, I usually try to have at least one image, and that is usually centered. Off-set images are easy to do, I know, but lol don’t suit my style somehow. I’ve noticed I’ve started to use a few colloquialisms and Australian and American slang. That’s a style thing. and I try to write in a conversation manner.

Back in the days of a ‘young’ internet, slang and colloquial expressions were frowned upon, due to the fact that many internet users didn’t/don’t speak English as their first language and would misunderstand. Back in the day there were websites where you could learn all the best ways to get your message across. Useage.net doesn’t appear to exist anymore. It was good, very plain spoken, but very useful. Learnt a lot there.

— — — —

Interestingly, the three questions I have answered today are about form while the three to come are about content. I often compare ‘form’ to a fishing net and ‘content’ to the fish I’m trying to catch. So whenever I write ‘About Blogging’ I’m knotting the net–or repairing it–to go out fishing with it.

Pretty good image. My prompt was “Woman throwing out a fishing net”. Asking the resident AI to generate this image was a decision by me designed to escape copyright problems on the one hand, and paying iStock on the other.

Apparently, this pic is one of 18 chances I have at generating an AI image. 18 chances for the year? For ever? Thank the Universe that the color scheme still has the AI signature and it can’t be mistaken for an actual someone. Hopefully.

WP, where is the hang up?

I’ve probably spent about an hour trying to comment on people’s websites–my apologies to the people who missed out–and then, to top it all off, had half an hour trying to get back to my own blog!

I had three passwords turned down, one of them the one I just put in. Then I linked with a service I do have a strong connection with, and was turned down the minute I tried to input using them.

Of course it may not be the fault of the platform we all love, or why keep coming back?

I’ve written before about the immense chain of connections necessary to be able communicate in this manner. And that is not even considering things things like power supply, labor strikes and the weather.

Correct me anywhere where I go wrong listing the stages necessary to make blogging possible.

Me on my laptop or using my mobile > by way of Jetpack or WP classical > my internet link > signals to the nearest telecommunication tower > [I’m a bit hazy on the next step. Is it up to space to a communication satellite?] > to the next tower and hopping to where an undersea cable takes the signal to the next country?

Well, I can see I need to do a bit of research.

User-Friendly

Part Two of Blog Usability

Having a good night’s sleep often helps me to ‘think’ things through, with that kind of thinking being done in the unconscious. So while sitting down for breakfast this morning and checking the weather and my mail, I also checked how my latest blog post appears to people reading it on the their mobiles/cell phones or tablets.

First there are the four lines below: Title, Author, Categories and Date & Reading Time

Then the BLOG CONTENT, arguably the meat of the meal. My stats page tells me 8/10ths of people read just the email and they have the opportunity to Comment and or Like. Eight tenths of the time I do the same. Most mornings I have time to read things, but not comment.

People who click through and read on the Reader interestingly get the Tags in a header at the top. Nobody else does. Clicking through and reading on the Blog gets you the following list of additional bits and pieces.

Share this and Likes, another important bit. Then, Related posts. Then Tags, I was surprised to see. Then, the Published by … and About Me paragraph, followed by Leave a Comment. Finally, one after the other, the three new widgets. First the Search Box, followed by the mashed up Categories list and, finally, Recent Posts.

A lot of superfluous stuff in that list that I doubt anyone will read. One thing I dislike about the internet in the last 3 or 5 years … the amount of bloat and padding a reader needs to negotiate their way through!

It’s as if since no one is accountable for the amount of web-space being used … like we have vast distances of free geography to fill up and never mind the amount of electricity needed for cooling towers … and 3000 words looks far more impressive then 1500 words … repetition and padding are the new normal.

I grew up when paper newspapers and magazines were the go, when every inch of print had to be paid for, and flab, repetition and padding were cut ruthlessly. It seems to me we need to renew that contract. To save on cooling towers and save readers.

So. This is what’s going to happen. Starting at the end of my list, Recent posts is gone, as they are more or less taken care of in the Related Posts item. The list of Categories is gone, as the categories pertaining to that post are covered in the third line of the title block, and they are more useful to me in their nested format in settings.

While the Search Box is useful, I don’t know how useful it’ll be where it is. Wait and see is the go with that item. Then there’s Leave a Comment. I’m leaving that where it is.

Then, Published by … and About Me is starting to look rather jaded. It’s up for a make-over. Tags are said to be important but I often suspect the post’s title and categories are doing the grunt work. I might be able streamline Tags … they are a work in progress. Related Posts, Share This and Likes are all to stay.