Blog-Conscious Now

After wasting a lot of time yesterday and this morning trying to figure out mechanics of WordPress in order to arrange images on my post and do other things, I am glad to be in the Blogging 201 class. A year ago that post and three other separate drafts of posts would have already been published. Now that I take more time to do posts, this post will be the first published, not my two Words and Pictures posts. Given the intent of this blog, it’s fine to blog about blogging, but images are great for blogs as people look at them and don’t have to read or figure anything out. As an artist I love posting works in progress, etc.

When I wasn’t taking blogging classes, I would write a post or put images in it, maybe edit it, and throw it out there into the blogosphere. Now that I’ve been learning more about Blogging, branding, having an identity for your blog and clear focus, I’ve had a lot of interesting stuff come up that would not have without these valuable classes. And a lot of getting in the way of myself and not posting.

On the other hand, I miss the old days when I didn’t know or care about widgets and wrote long things and inserted research into the blog in the moment of looking at it. Blogging was more easy and satisfying…

Back then, Blogging, though I didn’t get “Blog-Conscious” felt like a genre of putting words and images out in the world. I would have said, it’s a fun and fast way to communicate ideas and things I’m interested in, throw them out to the blog, then if I want to add more or change ideas or do a series of posts, I add more, with the option of not reading the first post if I know the next train of thought. The writing style felt like: not a journal or sketchbook, not an essay but a “Post”. A post for me was fast, easy, a way to organize my thoughts while writing the post but not go into the territory of free association unless chosen for some reason. There was a quick satisfaction and the feeling of having pinned down some topic to revisit. There was the good feeling of knowing my “readers” would enjoy the post and let me know if they had thoughts about the topic or reactions and that they wouldn’t care that much about the way it looked or how I wrote it!

Ignorance is bliss! I didn’t care much what the blog looked like or any of that stuff. The only goals were to post often, have fun, feel pretty good about time management and fitting blogging into my already full box of creative expression tools.

The evolution of this blog: In the last year or so I started taking classes and learning all the things that some people learned before they started posting. Like most things on the internet such as Twitter, it seemed the right time to get more Blog Conscious. I revamped and changed a lot about the blog.

This new information and knowledge also meant that posting was more slow; I would have more drafts than before and there was often some stumbling block that would lead to who do you do this? took too much time finding out, give up or same thing but figured it out eventually with the wish that I could have back the hour of time spent trying to figure out how to do things and find things.

Today’s example: Images and inserting and posting them on the blog. Now I look and ask before posting: where does this image go? where do any words go? how big should the image be? That last question put me in territory that resembles having a huge thing of yarn that got mixed with other yarns and taking the time to restore order, untying, etc.

Frustration tolerance got higher and maybe it would save me time if it got lower!

How do I keep some of that stye of blogging while being better at making the whole blog a gestalt? That’s one goal for the first class assignment about goals… I’m going to publish this now so I get that feeling of satisfaction! and throw a picture in at the end and not care what size it comes out!!!