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There should have been a blog on this day, but sadly I couldn’t get access to upload one. As I didn’t want to miss my challenge, but also didn’t want to cheat by back posting something, the blog that should have appeared here was done as an extra post on another day.
It can be found here.
There is only a month left and the challenge to write a blog every day for a year will finally have come to an end.
I’ve gone through the normal stages. It started off easy, I’d done a blog every day in November 2008 during NaNoWriMo so if I could write a 65,000 word novel in a month and do that how could a blog a day be an issue?
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Then I went through the hard months. Every day I was scraping around trying to think of something to write. I plugged the gap with the New Music Monday post, the Rum and Uncanny Tune of the week and later The Slow Tomato Race. All of those helped.
During the middle of the year it got difficult again. Then in the autumn I started to find the blogs were piling up again. November, for example, has mostly been written during September and October and scheduled in. Easy! December is currently looking a bit sparse but I’m sure it’ll fill up.
And after that then I’m done. 365 blog posts. The majority, I’m sure, of very little interest to anyone except me (although people do read and comment on them). Regardless, it’s been fun.
2010 will be less packed, although only as far as blog posts go. Some, I’m sure, will be sorry to hear that Tweets and status updates aren’t going to stop, because I have other plans.
The New Music Mondays will still be around, but the Rum and Uncanny posts are going, mainly because I can’t rate songs quick enough. Writing Wednesdays are obviously going to be around. Other post will be as and when it occurs to me, or when I get around to writing them.
As for those daily tweets, well, The Wandering Year is going back into online publication again (after some editing and tweaking), and the Friday short story will still be around, so all in that’ll probably lead to a new post of some sort each day, the only thing is, I won’t have to write as many of them (kind of, if you see what I mean).
2010 is going to be a fun packed year.
I have complained in a numbered of forums about people using cryptic titles. Something that gives no hint as to what the content is does not encourage me to read it. My stance on blog posts, however, has been completely different. Instead I have treated the titles of my blogs like newspaper headlines: a play on words based around the subject.
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For once this isn’t something I’ve done on a whim. My reason was partly because I like puns, and partly to do with the way blogs are read. Much like their paper brethren the title of the blog is often seen along with the first line or two (depending on what reading software is being used). This means that if you follow the newspaper model the first sentence of a blog will be a sub-heading, giving the reader more information about the article.
Hopefully this works. I enjoy the fun I can have with a few words and would rather not change, but if anyone has a different point of view do let me know.
Writing
Local and national newspapers are withering away. Some have already closed down and many more are likely to follow. The problems arise because less people are buying them and advertising revenues have dropped. This is set against the backdrop of a high cost base and the internet offering free news at every turn.
There has been talk that local newspapers could become even more focused, narrowing their coverage down to just one or two communities rather than whole cities or metropolitan areas. Even if this does push up sales, however, it isn’t going to reduce costs by the same proportion.
One idea I have not seen explored is to harness the power of bloggers. Papers need content that doesn’t cost them anything. Most bloggers crave exposure. Therefore why not feature a few blog posts each week? It would be like having some extra columnists for free.
The paper is still going to require editors, but it would need fewer journalists, and those it did have could spend their time following up news articles. The bloggers wouldn’t need to be paid in cash because what they are actually getting is advertising.
I, for one, would like more people to visit my site, I’m writing the blogs anyway, so having them featured in a physical paper and/or on the newspaper’s web site, would be great.
It might have been a stupid challenge and it’s probably only entertaining me, but I am now halfway through my attempt to do a blog post every day for 2009.
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I will admit that I get to the end of each month and wonder if I’ll find another thirty things to write about, but then I’ve also found a number of ways to cheat. The new music post each Monday was the first one: posting one track a week wasn’t difficult given the amount of music I already listen to.
After that the idea for a peculiar tune of the week occurred to me, and that meant I’d taken care of two out of seven days.
Now, of course, I also have ‘The Slow Tomato Race’, meaning there are just four days to thinking about. Another six months of bloging and I will have proved I can write 365 blog posts in a year. The question as to whether it’s drivel or not will, of course, remain hanging in the air.
So here’s to hitting the target and a further 180 blog entries where I waffle about whatever wanders through my head.
Last Sunday I left the house and realised I hadn’t got a blog ready to post. As I had a short walk to the bar I thought I’d write something.
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As the phone has a word processor and a keyboard the writing bit was easy. Posting it was a slightly different matter. I decided to use the browser on the phone to log-in to WordPress and post it. Most of it worked fine although I couldn’t add any tags, nor change the scheduled time of the post. Still it worked so not a bad first attempt.
I know WordPress supports options for mobile posting so I’ll have to look into it just in case such a situation arises again. Solving spelling mistakes, on the other hand, are a different matter.
Following on from the fact that a blog each day during November last year was so easy, at the start of 2009 I committed to post something every day until the end of December. (Complaints about spamming can be sent for collection at the usual bars. 
)
The other week, however, due to a scheduling error I missed a day. I could, obviously, just back date a post to fill the gap, but that would seem disingenuous. Having said that, all I’m doing now is blogging about not blogging. An absolute scandal, I tell you.
Still at least I’ve just dropped it in mid morning rather than making it look like a real effort. And the timing will ensure it never even hits Twitter or Facebook. How kind am I.
So, one month in and I’ve run out of blogs. Well, okay, I haven’t. I ran out of those I’d written and uploaded.
I’m blaming it on the WordPress scheduling system, as all the blogs up until now have been typed and uploaded in batches. It therefore wasn’t until today that I remember to check if I was close to the end of the current batch and as luck would have it today was the first day I needed to post a new one.
Tomorrow is therefore the start of a new bunch.
Many moons ago I commented on how the facilities Myspace and Facebook offer should just be available as plug-ins to normal websites (status feeds etc.), but rather than being complicated things to install like WordPress and Twitter feeds, they should be as simple as a Facebook page is to create.
The fact that web site creation and hosting is not user friendly means that those of my friends who can use the internet mostly hang around on Facebook. Those who can barely cope with a Google search haven’t even made it that far and even those who do understand blogs don’t really get the idea of RSS feeds and so miss out on the exciting stuff I write. (You know the exciting stuff I’m on about, don’t you?)
This means that out of all of my friends only three or four read this blog and the rest of the people here are those who wander by every now and again after reading a chapter of my story.
What do I want? I want all my friends to be as internet literate as I am. I want them all to have a web site with a blog on it. We all have interesting things to say. I know this because some of them I talk to every day (seriously, with the advent of mobile phones it’s not just woman who do this), others use email rather than the phone and some manage round-robin text conversations. If we all used the same medium (i.e. multi-content web sites) we could have some really interesting discussions.
Maybe one day we will. Roll on web 3.0.
Last week a friend who uses WordPress reminded me of a feature I had seen but never made any use of – scheduling posts to be published at a future date.
Never being short of things to say I have often built up a list of both blogs I want to write and blogs I have already written but not yet published. When Tony brought up the subject of scheduling posts it suddenly occurred to me that I was wasting my time writing posts in MS Word and then saving them until they were copied into WordPress. Why not, instead, put the post directly onto the site and just set it to be published at some future date. Far too obvious for me to have worked this out on my own.
As I’m now trying to do at least one post a day for the next year this, feature is even more useful and as I’ve started New Music Monday and Odd Tune of The Week it also means I can hear a piece of music and blog about it straight away, but have it pop up the following week. Well done WordPress for yet another quality feature.
