9 posts tagged “blogging”
Well, after almost two weeks of pulling my hair out and getting nowhere that I wanted to be, I've pulled the plug on my TypePad account and am self-hosting WordPress. I'm thrilled ... WordPress is slick, "problems" are easy to solve, it looks great and gives me (almost) total control. I just started things up yesterday afternoon and am already farther ahead than I was yesterday. Lots more work to do and no time to do it today, but here is my latest work in progress. I have a different look in mind eventually ... but the current template will do for now.
(with apologies to karen and others in the six apart universe ... )
Five Reasons TypePad Lost My Business:
Interface too hard to use. It feels like one of those things that is intuitive for the people who built it and can visualize the relationship between the structure of the GUI and the architecture ... but it is NOT easy for folks who did not participate in its development.
Results poor. No matter how much the various "help" menus assured me I could do this or that with the design, it never quite worked out as it should. Or as I would wish it.
Promised functionality not delivered. Come on. I signed up for TypePad years and years ago, for free I think, under a completely different alias. For reasons beyond my understanding, when I upgraded my old account and started to add folders of content and different blogs, the original folder structure and naming conventions stuck and my new material NEVER appeared anywhere that could have a domain mapped to it. Come on. This isn't rocket science, it is Networking 101. Folder structures. Naming conventions. Pointing. Addressing. Get with the program people. This is what you are supposed to know how to do. Furthermore, widgets promising this or that functionality never worked, nor did they ever really "look" right when placed in the sidebars.
Customer service ... too little, too late. I was assured yesteday, after many days of not hearing from anyone and me pleading for information, that they were "working on" the domain mapping problem and would have it fixed "within a week". A week?!? I'm at the second highest level of membership, this has been a stupid problem since day one, the entire crux of why I'm doing this blog switch involves me being able to map specific domains to specific locations ... and you are going to take almost three weeks to let me know whether or not this is even possible?!? When your own bumpf assures users that it is "a breeeze"? What other delights await?
I'm paying for this? Given all the above, what exactly is it that I'm paying for? At the second highest level of membership?
I will say that TypePad made membership cancellation easy and they sent me a survey that allowed me to communicate all this effectively and, I hope, constructively. But, as of mid-afternoon yesterday, I'm a total WordPress convert. I'd been afraid of the self-hosting option as being possibly too complex for me, but it turns out that it is pretty damn easy. And I'm already paying for the privilege so this is actually "free" for me.
I feel like my blogging self is almost back on track now after being lost in the wilderness. Hurrah! :-)
It was 1990, late summer/early fall. First L-T love and I were living in a gorgeous, quirky apartment over a tailor shop on Church St. in St. Catharines. I had a rather fun job with a steel distribution company that included bookkeeping on a new-fangled computer program called "Gem", making inside sales calls, and using a forklift to load and unload steel from the trucks as they arrived at the warehouse. I was the only "worker", other than the outside sales people - all men. There were four - count'em four - senior managers, only two of whom were actively involved in the day to day running of the joint. It was a cool little entrepreneurial venture launched by a bunch of senior execs from Toronto who were tired of living in the big city and wanted a taste of small town life. Basically, I got to do everything including, on occasion, accompany them on their negotiation trips with the larger steel suppliers.
Things were going ok, for the most part. Computers as integral parts of our lives were not yet present and, yet, this small exposure at work intrigued me. Through a family connection, I had an opportunity to buy a "real" computer for a vastly reduced - at the time - price. I remember it clearly: $2,500 got you a 386 Pentium and a 14" monitor, a dot matrix printer and Windows 3.0, running over MS DOS 5.1. Actually, it was a brief flirtation with something IBM called "PC DOS" round about then as they were feeling a wee bit pissy with Mr. Gates. Anyway, at the time, I didn't know anything about all that. Based on the stability of my job, I went and got a line of credit at the bank and invested in the computer as, at this price, at the time, it was a steal. We hauled the very large boxes home, took an entire day to set it up, and stared at it for a long time. Figured out how to turn it on and watched with frustration as Windows revealed its penchant for the blue screen of death.
Almost immediately after making this investment, I got laid off. The senior execs had a falling out amongst themselves, much legal wrangling, and the whole operation was being moved to a new location, far away.
Because the special opportunity to buy the computer was through an employee program, there was no returning it for a refund. I now had debt and a big plaster-coloured monster on my desk that I had no idea what to do with. Or what it could do.
It came with something called a 2600 baud modem and a phone cable. I plugged it in.
What followed was three months, the better part of a winter, of me getting up, kissing my partner good-bye after making coffee and having breakfast, and heading upstairs to sit in front of this ... thing ... for eight to ten hours a day, figuring it out. It wasn't like I was forcing myself to do it. I was drawn to it. I learned all about MS/PC DOS (same diff), learned how Windows "sat on top" of it, learned command lines, learned the limitations of Windows as an "operating system", learned how to use the modem (uh oh), and learned about Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs). Me and my coffee, pre-Internet, pouring over books, cranking up the long distance bills, and learning almost strictly and entirely by trial and error.
I learned a lot. I sat with my L-T partner's brother, someone who passed for a computer geek at the time, and would listen to his lively explanations of the internal workings of the computer and that really helped. I tried to ask intelligent questions but, not being formally trained, I felt really quite inadequate and in awe of anyone who actually Knew How These Things Worked.
By the end of the winter self-directed tutorial, I had started two businesses, one of which I sold 20 months later after starting it from nothing. (That business taught me the basics of databases.) The other lives on, after several morphs, as my consulting practice.
Flash forward - wow - eighteen years. In some respects, I'm still sitting here, pointing and clicking and wondering what will happen next. But, this week especially, it feels like I'm back at square one.
See, I'm branching out my creative and business online activities. I'm in the process of moving this blog, The HandBasket, to TypePad. I have plans for an additional five, count'em five, blogs that will also be on TypePad. Here on Vox, we are all producing content and driving traffic to vox.com from which they benefit enormously in terms of ad revenues. One could be resentful of this, but it isn't until one has tried to set up a blog, including domain mapping and advertising, from scratch, in the still quite buggy TypePad interface that one appreciates the slickness and cozy-cushy comfort of Vox.
Of course, Vox and TypePad are part of the same company, so many elements feel somewhat familiar. But the experience of "blogging" is quite different in the TypePad world. First - and this is what I'm working on now - the creation of a visually-attractive look/feel for the blog is trickier for those of us who are not particularly design-oriented. I'm thanking my lucky stars that I have retained some sense and basic "hunt/peck" skill about HTML and CSS. Still, I'm never sure what is possible or desirable, design-wise. It is - as it was eighteen years ago - all trial and error. I keep trying stuff and thinking, oh, I like that or euw that sucks. This will take a while.
Then there are crazy bugs, like trying to put one's blog on FeedBurner and being told that the feed is not verifiable. Then going through the verification process to slice out, line by line, the orphan/stray code that has been inserted but will not pass the feed test. Ref. my gratitude at having a passing familiarity with HTML.
Then there are "widgets". I've inserted about a dozen of them into the new HandBasket, only to find that they don't actually work without significant tweaking, some of which require a fair amount of fiddly concentration and not a small amount of frustration.
There is the interaction, selection and placement of ads which, in TypePad , will be entirely under my control. According to the stats monitor I've been keeping, The HandBasket (at Vox) has drawn an oddly consistent and ever-growing flow of traffic however I have NO expectation that it will be a money-maker for me. I'm using this blog as my sandbox at TypePad to figure out how it all works and what works best in terms of layout and types of ads. As with my experience eighteen years ago, it is a matter of trial and error. I feel that once I get this process in place and under my belt with The HandBasket, even with no expected revenues, the creation of several "real" revenue-generating blogs will be much easier.
There seems to be a myriad of tools out there promising great things in terms of keeping track of stats, providing search functionality, feeds, hits, bounces, referrers, etc. etc. Again, trial and error ... good solid learning that also takes the most time.
Then, there is the domain-mapping issue. TypePad makes this seem fairly straight-forward but, in reality, something has screwed up in their folder structure that has made it impossible for me to map my totally cool new domain names to anything in my TypePad account. They have acknowledged this and are working on the problem, apparently. I think it is only a matter of aligning the folders properly. (Cut to visual of me drumming my fingers on the table.)
Oh, and for reasons not yet known to me, I can't upload files through the upload button on the toolbar. Control panel, yes. Upload button, no. (More finger drumming.)
See, here at Vox, this is all pre-fab. When it is time to write, one logs in, clicks create, and away you go. Wanna change your design? Click on "design" and click on a template. Boom, done. Wanna upload something? No problem. I'm trying to create a similarly cosy environment for myself as a creative sort of person at TypePad. I want to log in, understand the shortest, clearest route to expressing myself, and have it done. Afterall, there is a huge relationship between form and content. If I don't find the process or the results pleasing, I won't keep at it. This learning curve has given me a new appreciation for the effort that has gone into creating Vox and I feel less resentful for the lack of ad revenue sharing.
It sure reminds me of that intense learning time, oh so long ago, when I had to force myself to channel my creativity through a technological interface I did not completely understand. Let's hope my results yield something pleasing to both me and you, dear readers.
Watch my work-in-progress at the not-yet-launched new HandBasket. Stay tuned for the new domain name which I'll announce at the point in time when I'm ready to fully switch from Vox. Which is not yet. The search thingy doesn't work, the ads aren't quite right, and I'm not happy with the lay-out yet. But I'll get there ... :-)
Apparently, also insomniac's relief! :-) This just in from my friend, m ...
Hi Venus,
I’m having a night of insomnia. Not that unusual. But guess how I spent the last half hour? Catching up on Venus' Blog! Enjoyed it enormously. Love the new bike, by the way. Have you and T thought about venturing down here for our wonderful bike path? Great shot of you in your kitchen and very impressed that you could have a sit down dinner for that many! Loved the video of the hamster and watched it twice. How can I email it to a friend? There’s more I wanted to comment on but I’m feeling sleepy now, so I will give sleep a chance.
BTW, I realized as soon as I saw the opera singing winner of the Brit show, that I have seen him perform. WONDERFUL!
Thanks for everything.
m
See? Blogging ... not just for breakfast anymore!
A cynical person might interpret this to mean that my blog is so boring that it makes insomniacs too sleepy to comment ... but, of course, I am not a cynical person.
Since switching from LiveJournal to Vox, I've had a relatively blissful blogging life. By which I mean that no one has spammed, harassed or taunted me. Having had this happen at LiveJournal, I must say that I am very happy with the privacy and commenting controls that allow me to discourage such interaction here. Comments from anyone other than a "friend" must be "approved" by me before being published on my blog. No anonymous commenting is allowed here.
I read Deborah's post this morning over coffee and followed a few of her links. It seems that all is not well in the blogging world ... people are being mean to each other out there. There is a movement afoot for more accountability in the blogging world - here are a few posts and articles to consider:
CupCate's post: Take Back The Blog! & Stop Wrestling With the pigs. Please note that this post includes Take Back The Blog! Day - April 28, 2007. Hm - perhaps I should post-date this entry!
The Blog Herald: Is Your Self-Worth Wrapped Up in Your Blog?
Tim O'Reilly's First Draft: Blogging Code of Conduct. I read with interest the importance of "no anonymous commenting" and "don't say anything online that you wouldn't say in person".
My own reflections on blogging (Bloggin' 2.0) when I moved from LJ to Vox last year.
The line between my online life and my concrete reality gets a bit blurry. I have off-line, "in-person" friends who read my blog but do not comment. I have off-line "in-person" friends who read and DO comment and interact with me here as well as in person. (I really love that part - mwah!) I have on-line "friends" whom I've never met but who do drop by read, and occasionally comment. (New Love finds it weird that there are people out there in the world whom I've never met in person yet refer to as "friends". :-) ) There are, apparently, on-line readers who lurk here.
The standards of behaviour remain the same for all of you, regardless of where we intersect. Treat yourself, and me by extension, with respect, decency, generosity and courtesy and you will get the same back from me. You may even find loyalty and affection over time. The moment I feel trashed, discarded or somehow reduced in worth, I get red flags. We will have a conversation, you and I, in private - either on-line or somewhere in the real world. At least, I'm going to try to. I have found that some people get very squirmy when they see me coming to call them on their shit. If I collect enough red flags from your less-than-respectful behaviour, I will simply back away from you. I'm too old for that shit, either on-line or in person. I just won't allow it in my life anymore. It drains me and I don't need it.
I want to underline something here. I've learned that when someone treats me badly, it is about THEM, not me. This has been a monstrously difficult lesson to learn and I do admit to having forgotten it a few times, very recently. A person being underhanded or vengeful is is acting out THEIR inability to be adult and direct - it isn't about me. It is about their own self-respect, or lack thereof.
Because I'm too old for sandbox behaviour, I have learned that it is quite okay to restrict the conditions under which crappy behaviours flourish, hence the commenting restrictions. I don't mind being called names like "control freak" for this. The label "control freak" has served me quite well over the years, actually. Don't knock it! In any case, I wouldn't invite the mudslingers to my house ... therefore, I am not going to create a welcome environment for them to my blog space. I will not choose to be where they are.
I need people around me who enrich and nurture themselves and others. People who are fundamentally kind and decent, loyal and direct. People who know about personal boundaries, privacy and basic ethics. I think such people are rare. From time to time, I hope I fulfill this personal mandate myself. I strive to - I like to surround myself with others who also set these elements as a personal standard. People who, like me, may slip occasionally but who "get" that their treatment of others mirrors their own feelings of self-worth.
Am I attempting to create a cosy, frictionless little fantasy world where no one disagrees? That just hasn't been my experience. There is a world of difference between disagreement and disrespect. However, when you get down to it, shouldn't we all be building lives with people around us who will support us, rather than tear us down? Isn't this the healthier choice?
So, I wonder about blogging sometimes. Meaning that I wonder about the activity itself. Sure, I often ponder specific posts and topics, usually when I'm hurtling down a highway or waiting for some students to finish some in-class group work. Neither of these times are conducive to the activity of writing, thinking, processing, creating.
But I also wonder about blogging itself. I love to write, but lately I don't have much to say, which makes the act seem indulgent somehow. I like to talk about my life, but then wonder about that value to others. Then I look at my own blogging pattern and I notice a profound upswing in my own interest/energy re.: blogging in the fall/winter, with a falling off as the New Year begins and my life gets more active.
I've started a new relationship, and I wonder if the energy that used to be spent writing is now being spent in conversation with her ...? When in doubt, I think it is probably a good thing for real life to trump on-line life.
My New Love wonders if blogging / writing is my way of working things out and I think there is some truth to that. Maybe the energy of a new relationship reduces the angst (or sets it aside for a while) so that there is less to work out?
Maybe I'm still in vacation mode ...? Reverse hibernating?
In any case, I just wanted to say that I really am still around, as evidenced by my willingness to destroy my professional reputation by sending out jokes that make no mathematical sense whatsoever but are good for a chuckle. (See below.) I'm reading other people's stuff. I'm enjoying Jennifer's new blog immensely and highly recommend it to
I miss wizzy and wish she would surface. Confession: I ate sushi pizza this week with Lex and margotinto in "our" place. Can you forgive me?
Bad E-Mail Joke that EVERYONE has called me on for the math. I don't write 'em, I just send 'em and yes my MBA filter was off or broken or still in Hawaii. I don't know ... but here it is ...
If you had purchased $1000.00 of Nortel stock three years ago, it would now be worth $49.00.
With Enron, you would have had $16.50 left of the original $1000.00.
WorldCom, you would have less than $5.00 left.
But if over the last three years you had purchased $1000.00 worth of beer, drank all the beer, then returned the cans or bottles for your refund you would
have $614.00.
So based on the above, the best current investment advice is to drink heavily and recycle.
My friend Jennifer has just started her first blog here. She is a smart, witty, philosophical sort, in that down-east sort of way, and a fine writer to boot. Please drop by to welcome her to the blogosphere.
I say this is her "first" blog because I know she is going to get hooked and will soon be managing several.
Yay, Jennifer!
I'm due at my friends' in a couple of hours where more Christmas festivities will begin. In preparation, I'm putting the final touches in a few appetizers ... curry chicken roll-ups (always a hit - I leave out the butter and use 10" tortillas instead), devilled eggs, and brie/mango quesadillas.
I like to have the TV on while I'm cooking but it needs to be on something I don't have to stare at continually, obviously. Something like a movie I've seen before. I thought the documentary on John Lennon, Imagine, would be appropriate on Christmas morning, while I cook.
Lennon is one of those touchstones in my life, an iconic figure, giant yet so very human and fragile. Fascinating. Anyway, one of the first questions asked by an interviewer in this fabulous film is "Why are you doing this? Why are you filming, documenting your life like a diary?"
Which made me wonder ... wouldn't John have LOVED blogging? In fact, he would have LOVED the Internet - a way for ordinary people to get their own message out. To reach out to other ordinary people to find their own extraordinary-ness.
A John Lennon blog ... Imagine that ... !
I'm posting about my post, so I guess that makes this a meta-post. :-)
The warm reception that my Bloggin' v 2.0 post received was a bit overwhelming. I realize that I am now experiencing a bit of performance anxiety.
That post actually started out as the body of the e-mail that I intended to send to friends and readers about the change in my blog address. It was Sunday morning, the coffee rocked, and I was riffing about blogging. I get a lot of feedback that my e-mails are "too long" and "too detailed". These days, I think anything written in paragraphs with proper punctuation is deemed "too long". One of my pet peeves is the deterioration of English as both a spoken and written language - but I also think there must have been a tutor in Shakespeare's time who was worried about the same thing. The language has changed and also survived in a continually mutating form.
Nonetheless, as I reviewed the length of this announcement to friends/readers, I realized that no one in their right mind would read the entire thing and that I'd better give them a choice about doing that. So the announcement got shortened to a few lines, the e-mail became that post, and the post wound up on the front page at Vox for 24 hours.
Wow. More than seven people are actually reading this. And thinking about it. And writing back to me. Enter performance anxiety.
My best thoughts about blog posts come to me when I am nowhere near a computer. Usually they arrive when I am driving up or down the Don Valley Parking Lot, wishing I could get out of second gear, and muttering under my breath about global warming. I'll have an "A-HA!" moment as my engine idles and spews god-know-what into the atmosphere - a confluence of connecting ideas so powerful, moving and obvious that I simply MUST record it in my blog for posterity. Time will pass, classes will get taught, activities will be executed ... and I will get home and remember the "a-ha!" but have no freaking clue what it was about. Yes, I should have a notepad handy, or I could remember that my cell phone has an audio memo feature specficially for this kind of thing.
I guess a "note to self" about taking notes would be a "meta-note"? :-)
About Blogging: For the past year, I've been experimenting with "blogging" as a journaling activity and I have, for the most part, really enjoyed it. I have learned a few things along the way ...
a) Not everyone understands, or gives a rat's a$$ about, blogging.
b) Balancing "honest reflection" with "prudence and judiciousness" is a tough call.
c) Lurkers far outnumber participants.
d) I want more.
Please indulge me a few minutes to look at these a bit more closely.
a) Not everyone understands, or gives a rat's a$$ about, blogging. Or, as phrased as the title of a recent book on the topic, No One Cares What You Had For Lunch. Lex is doing a great job of exploring this theme. The thing is, though, that people really DO care what Lex has for lunch!
Is the role of the blog to "entertain an audience", or to record a snapshot, a mental/emotional/physical moment in time, within the life of one individual? I'm a Libra, so I'm a bit torn on this, but I do lean towards the latter.
I'm not really sure what my deep-seated psychologial motivation for blogging is - happily, such self-knowledge is not a prerequisite for the activity. It simply appeals to me to have a virtual record of what is going on with me - of who I am - at particular points in time. It appeals to me to think that a handful of people from my "real" world might take a moment to check in with me via the blog from time to time. It appeals to me that complete strangers will stop by and that they might find what they see interesting.
However, I take issue with the author of the aforementioned book. I have discovered that people *do* care what I have for lunch, or as is the case with me more often, for breakfast. I have lost count of the number of times I've run into people in the "real" world who chide me for not updating my blog quickly enough for their tastes. On a number of occasions, the gentle chiding has come from people whom I hadn't seen for months and whose interest in my blog comes as a complete shock to me. More on this under "Lurkers/Participants" ...
b) Balancing "honest reflection" with "prudence and judiciousness" is a tough call. A blog is not to be confused with a diary. A diary is meant to be read only by the author or, in some rare cases, to be read by the general public after the author's demise.
A blog is a semi-public set of reflections that can be read by lots of people, friends/family/strangers, as soon as the author hits "save". It is an odd combination of power, vulnerability, and responsibility.
As I see it, a writer has three choices ... write about oneself, write about others, write about actions witnessed or shared. To write too clearly and closely about one's perception of others in one's life could quickly alienate those individuals. I have heard of fiction writers losing close friends for fear that those friends find themselves as characters in the next published novel. I think something similar goes on with regard to blogging. Writing about actions witnessed or shared loses steam without the author taking a clear perspective, an interpretation, on what one saw or did. Once you head into interpretive territory, you are really writing about yourself - which is why bloggers are accused so often of being self-indulgent.
Writing about oneself is at once the safest and also most dangerous of pursuits. How much is too much information? Those of us with any kind of artistic bent know that clear access to our emotional life is key to any sense of creativity. Years ago, someone asked a theatre prof of mine why theatre people were so emotional, so "flighty", so intense. He replied that our emotions are our raw material, creatively speaking. We need them - need to pursue them, to follow the trail, see where it leads - to explore, to take risks. We need to have not only experienced the entire spectrum, the good and the bad, but also to have examined and processed it. I think this is true across the board for creative expression, not just for theatre peeps. Musicians, writers, painters, sculpters ... passion underlies all these pursuits.
It has come to my attention in the intervening years since my theatre training that not all people in my life have this same risk-taking, exploratory perspective. :-) I trip over the TMI line all the time, both in person and in my blog. To do less feels dishonest to me ... to do this too often feel terribly uncomfortable for others. I shall continue to feel around in the dark for this fine line.
c) Lurkers far outnumber participants. For the most part, this is ok with me. My fondest wish would be to have more commentary, more interaction. But perhaps, like Chance the Gardener in Being There, some people just "like to watch".
The most negative experience associated with my old blog address has to do with individuals using the anonymous commenting feature to leave purposefully hurtful remarks. At my old blog address, I enabled the "anonymous" commenting feature to make it easy for anyone to participate without having to sign in, or create an account, or to identify themselves in any way. What was not well known amongst the "anonymous" posters is that I also enabled a feature to track IP addresses. I was able to determine, conclusively, the identity of the computers from which the comments were sent in all but one of these "anonymous" cases. (If you want to know more about how I did this, please e-mail me and I'll explain it. :-) )
Years ago, the Internet was envisioned as a sort of freewheeling, boundary-free, open society - a very '60's concept. I'm a 60's kinda gal, so this appeals to me. My flower-power perspective has changed radically in the past year. One of my key learnings from my first year of blogging is that, given a chance to be anonymous, some surprising people in my life will actually use the cloak of anonymity to be cruel. I now believe that people need to have the guts to take responsibility and ownership for what they say to me. For walking into my virtual house and speaking with me.
I need to leave that negativity behind now, hence the new blog address. Unfortunately, I also need to exercise more control over how comments are made within my blog. So here is my double-edged message to you all:
1. I'd love it if you were to find something interesting enough to comment on.
2. You'll need to "sign in" to Vox.com in order to do that. I'm not sure what that process entails or how onerous it is.
To the small but active community at my old address - I will still be dropping by and reading your material. And commenting where appropriate. My account will be there in perpetuity. But, as of this morning, I consider my old blog "closed" and my new blog "open".
d) I want more. The old blog location felt very limited with regard to design and content. The user interface is not easy or intuitive - editing a single post involved numerous click throughs and drill-downs. To add links or integrate content, I had to use raw HTML, which I am neither skilled at or very fond of. So far, the vox.com interface is a breeze and is actually fun and intuitive to use. I can make the content richer and more dynamic here ... the "fun" quotient means that I'll likely feel compelled to post more frequently.
I can summarize the above point simply by saying that I had blog envy. There - I said it. I wanted a cooler blog that is easier to manage and more fun to use.
So - there you have it ... my blogging raison d'être ... I do hope you will stay tuned for more.
