I’ve had several ideas recently for blog posts, but when I sat down and tried to write them none of them really worked out. I then tried a Christmas short story, but although I was pleased with much of it, I couldn’t get the ending right. I couldn’t get it to say what I wanted it to.
Meh.
I think I’ll just sign off until the new year, and leave you with a festive picture of trees in the mist.
Wishing you all a Happy Christmas and a Happy New Year.
It’s a fight to the death!
Well, okay, not quite that, but bear with me for a bit longer.
The other week I gave a short talk to my writing group on reasons a writer should be on social media and, more importantly, why they needed a blog. I’m not going to go into this in any detail now, but I promised I’d summarise what I said in bullet points, and then thought it might be worth putting up here to see if anyone felt like adding anything to it.
So…
Why?
How?
Issues
There are millions and millions of bloggers out there.
That must mean there are a huge number of talented people beavering away writing posts that would really interest me, but who I have never heard of. And looking through the list of those I do follow, I can see that a large proportion of them have not posted for six months or a year or more. I hope that’s nothing to do with me…
But that must mean it’s time to track down some more to follow.
So if you have a particular favourite or two you would like to suggest I go and take a gander at, please leave a link in the comments box.
In particular, I like to read posts on India and Nepal, creative writing, and environmental issues, but my interests are by no means limited to these. I also follow quite a few others who post about the most diverse things.
I tried this exercise a year and a half ago, and the result was half a dozen splendid new (to me) bloggers to follow.
So, let’s do it again!
My contribution, then, are the following two bloggers:
Delhi-based artist Prenita Dutt blogs as Indian Saffron here and really deserves a much wider audience for her beautiful paintings.
Ellen Hawley is an American living in Cornwall, England, who blogs about the eccentricities, madness and just plain weirdness of much of British life. Full of dry humour and always very readable, her blog can be found here.
My loyal follower will have noticed that I have a tendency to drop off of the grid for a while from time to time.
I do that, yes. Sometimes I feel I don’t really have anything worth saying, and at other times I feel there is just too much (self-imposed) pressure on me to come up with a new blog post or to keep up with all those I follow.
Some people thrive on deadlines and work best that way. Others dread them, especially those who have regular confidence and anxiety issues.
Dreadlines, indeed.
I’m lucky in that I’ve never really had the kind of job where I have someone shouting at me constantly to produce plans or reports by this or that deadline, or else I’ll be sacked and out of work and the family will be thrown out of the house onto the streets and starve boo-hoo. Yet I set myself the task or writing a new blog post once a week or twice a week, or whenever I feel I should be doing that.
Preposterous, isn’t it?
I enjoy blogging, and enjoy following other blogs, but every now and again I wonder why on earth I don’t just go and spend the day walking in the countryside or cleaning the house or exercising the badger or something.
And that is why I’ve been rather quiet for a week or two.
So, here’s a picture of a small boy and three sharks on a donkey in the desert as some sort of recompense for you.
You’re welcome.
Apparently, I how have 1000 followers.
Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!
But, really?
I suppose this should be reason to celebrate, or at least look pleased with myself, but let’s just stop a moment and examine the figures a little.
Out of those 1,000 followers, 150 of those are my Facebook friends.
Because that’s what WordPress does, it automatically adds them to your tally. No matter if they are all blog followers anyway, they add the lot. So lots have been counted twice.
So that takes out around 50.
And of the rest of my Facebook friends, a good half never, ever, visit my blog (fickle lot!).
So, another 50 gone. And we’re down to 900.
But out of those 900, there are a lot who have left the blogging scene completely. Without trawling through every one of them, it is fairly easy to take a random clutch of them (quite a large clutch, I must say) and go to see whether they are still active. It’s hardly a scientific method, but approximately one third have either disappeared completely, or haven’t posted for three months or more, leading me to suspect they’ve packed up.
So, down to about 600.
Of those 600, again looking at a few random clutches, after their initial contact and ‘follow’, I don’t think a good third ever came back again; they probably just hoped to get a follow back.
Down to about 400.
And out of those, about a third again don’t seem to have visited for at least a year.
So, I suspect the number of actual, active followers is close to 250, or a quarter of the ‘official’ figure.
But what does it matter, anyway? The point about posting is that someone should read what has been written, and then hopefully interact by commenting occasionally, or at least ‘liking’ now and again. It’s not compulsory, of course, but it would be odd if a regular visitor never did either. So as long as I get a decent number of regular readers who do interact with my posts, I’ll be a happy bunny.
On the other hand, if this post gets 1000 likes, I will eat my words.
Some while ago I wrote a post explaining some of the reasons why I might occasionally choose to un-follow a blog. Surprisingly, it seemed to strike a chord with a great many readers, and has been my most popular post so far. The link is here if you wish to have a look.
I thought I’d write a follow up post today, outlining a couple more reasons I might choose to un-follow a blog, or why I might decline to follow it in the first place.
Several times I have been sent invitations to follow a site I have never heard of. The owners of these sites have never had the manners to visit mine, or if they have they have not had the courtesy to acknowledge this in any way. The first I have known of their existence is a WordPress email inviting me to follow them. I will not be visiting their sites, never mind following them.
I have a couple of followers who have followed me, but only ever leave comments that invite me to follow their sites. Again, I shall not visit, for that is just bad manners.
This happens on other antisocial media sites, of course. I get terribly annoyed when someone I’ve barely come across messages me and says ‘I’ve just liked your page, come and like mine’. Er, no. Not until you learn some manners.
Then there are those bloggers who follow me, but only visit me after I have been on their site and left a ‘like’ or a comment. Instantly, they then visit for the first time in a month and ‘like’ three or four (or even more!) posts in the space of a few seconds. There is no way they could have read these posts in that time, of course. It is possible they think they are being polite by doing this, but I’m afraid it feels they only care about getting traffic to their sites.
I would imagine most people blog because they want their posts to be seen and read. Some ‘collect’ likes and followers, but most of us don’t (I do admit I am chuffed when I get a visitor from a fresh country, though, and therefore get a ‘new’ flag on my list!).
And I am extra double chuffed with fresh cream on top and little sprinkles of pure chocolate with the dozens of fantastic bloggers I have got to know since I first joined in with this lunacy a couple of years ago!
Despite the moaning, it was a great decision.
As I’m sure we all do, I frequently come across blog posts that I think are particularly interesting. Occasionally, though, I come across one I think is exceptional. I’ve been known to bookmark one or two and return to them several times, usually because they are about something that particularly interests me, but always because they are so well written and put together.
There are only so many blogs you can follow, and there must be thousands out there I’ve never heard of, but which I would follow instantly were I to come across them.
So the challenge I’m throwing out is if you have seen a post that you consider outstanding, please post the link in the comments thread so I can go and take a look. Anyone who follows me will have a vague idea of what I’m interested in, but if the post is that good, I might strike out and read something completely new to me!
The only rule I’m making is that the post must be by someone else, not one of your own.
My contribution to you is this post by bNomadic, a photo essay on the Mall Road in Mussoorie, a hill station in Northern India, which caught my attention since I hope to go there sometime next year.
Here’s a post from a couple of years ago which might be of interest if you haven’t read it before. (I would say that, wouldn’t I?)
Blogging has always been about self-promotion. The first known blogs were on cave walls, although they were pretty crude, to be honest, and it is often really difficult to make out what the bloggers were on about. There is speculation, indeed, that to refer to them as ‘blogs’ might be a little misleading. The fact that they tend to be short and that it is very hard to make out what they mean, leads some experts to assume that they were an early form of Twitter. And then the fact that they frequently depict crude human figures, especially exaggeratedly female ones, and various animals, suggest that even in these early times, social media were largely the preserve of the young person.
‘Share if you think these babes are hot.’
By the time of the rise of the first true civilisations in Egypt, they were beginning to get the hang of it. They have left massive numbers of inscriptions all over walls and columns and pretty well anything else that they could get a hammer and chisel near.
‘Amenhotep snubbed in Big Brother Pyramid game – LOL’
Some even see the Rosetta Stone as a forerunner of Google, but others don’t.
The first English blogger was The Venerable Bede. His blog is one of the main sources of our knowledge of Saxon times, which is a bit of a bugger really, when you consider how reliable social media are today as a source of modern history. He probably missed out most of the good stuff. But he blogged in Old English, anyway, which no one can understand nowadays so it probably doesn’t matter.
Leonardo da Vinci did a wicked selfie, but would probably be criticised nowadays for how few he produced. To be anyone on social media, it is probably necessary to post a minimum of twenty selfies in any twenty four hour period, but Leo was never up to that. But most of his blogs were all about what would then be science fiction and art and politics…so he’d have fitted in quite well with today’s bloggers really.
Samuel Pepys’ diaries are, of course, just the notes he took for his blogs. They are a mix of politics and news and what his family were up to, and his ‘conquests’ of various ladies. Wisely, he wrote most of this in shorthand and, even more wisely, put the more salacious bits in code. Nowadays, it is unnecessary to use code, since language is now changing so fast that no one can understand anything that was written more than six months ago anyway.
The Puritans thought blogging might be fun so they banned it, along with just about everything else, except breathing and praying. Well, praying, anyway.
A little later, newspapers were invented. These were not really blogs, since they were filled with news, rather than self-promotion, and it took a number of years before newspaper owners and editors realised that. Once they did, however, they worked very hard to make up for lost time, and now there are very few newspapers in the world that print mainly news.
And quite a lot that do not print any news at all.
In fact, they tend to be full of primitive opinion and often depict crude human figures, especially exaggeratedly female ones, and various animals.
And thus life turns full circle.
Photo credit (picture 1): jmarconi via VisualHunt.com / CC BY
Photo credit (picture 2): PMillera4 via Visualhunt / CC BY-NC-ND
Bob has decided to go into journalism. Did I have any hints, he asked me? How should he go about it? In the end, I suggested he write a guest post for me.
‘What on?’ he asked.
Oh, I don’t know, I replied, possibly a little too casually. How about blogging?
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll do that.’
Over to you, Bob:
‘Right, so…why do we follow blogs? Obviously, it is so we can read the pearls of wisdom they scatter before us mere mortals. And if every post is a literary delight, then how much better would it be if we could get twice as many? Or three times? Or more? Everyone wants to read 20 new posts a day from their favourite blogger, all the more so if they receive email notifications of each one, as they get the added frisson of a ‘ping’ every few minutes as another notification arrives; an anticipation of the huge pleasure they will get when they read the new post!
‘Black print on a white background is so yesterday! Experiment with colours – green on blue, perhaps, or if you must use black, try it against a dark grey background. This ensures the reader gives your post the attention it deserves, rather than perhaps just scanning it quickly and moving on to something else.
‘But don’t stop there! Times New Roman and all that ilk are boring, boring, boring! Fonts such as Blackadder or Edwardian Script make it so much more fun! Again, your reader must work hard to prove how much they adore your posts if they are going to get to the point of posting any sort of relevant reply.
‘Size is everything. there is nothing better than a 4,000 word post to read because, let’s face it, your readers have nothing better to do with their time than read your post. After all, it’s probably the highlight of their day, so why skimp on their reading pleasure? Especially so if you have employed fonts and background colours similar to those mentioned above!
‘Is that okay, Mick?’
‘It’s a bit short, Bob. I thought you were in favour of long posts?’
‘Um…I ran out of stuff.’
Thanks, Bob. I’ll let you know.
Home again, after a few days away. We walked the Peddars Way in East Anglia over four days, a distance of some fifty odd miles. Not exactly a long long distance footpath, so to speak (Gabe – you might have something to say on this!), but a pleasant enough walk and surprisingly remote from habitation in places.
Perhaps it’s a short distance footpath. And why not?
That should mean I have time to catch up with blogs and posts and writing and God knows what else, but I now have a very busy week ahead of me, so I just have time to bustle in and do a little housekeeping, as it were, only to then bustle out again until the weekend.
Hence a random selection of photographs from the walk.
And an extremely random selection of thoughts:
‘Why on earth is the only pub we pass on the first day – which is a long walk – closed at lunchtime? Other walkers bemoan this fact. They must miss out on a whole load of trade.’
‘Are we all honorary Peddars this week?’
‘I don’t really like staying in bed and breakfast places – it feels too much like borrowing someone else’s room for the night, and I feel I’m imposing on them, even though we are paying to stay there. I’d rather stay in an impersonal hotel.’
‘In all of the huge number of pig farms we pass, the fields are full of little metal houses for the pigs, with straight roads criss-crossing them. Do the pigs give these roads names, or simply number them on a grid system, as in New York?’
‘And do the teenage pigs have to make their own entertainment, or do they expect it to be provided?’
‘Why do large pub chains make their pubs so incredibly unappealing?’
Now I must rush off and attempt to organise myself for the week ahead.
Speak soon!
Ciao!
Mick Canning 