Tag: blogging

Categories
life meta

Backfilling

When I came back to WordPress in February of 2007 the focus of the site (Recovering Technophile) was technology and social/political commentary. I imported my writing from the blogger blog I was leaving and those posts which fit that focus from my earlier blogs. After the technology portion withered and the politics portion blossomed I spun off the political blog – what had become Pursuit of Liberty – and removed most of the posts from that spinoff that had no connection to politics. Here I could now focus on personal, spiritual, and other topics without reservation. In that spirit I finally got around to importing my posts from those ancient blogs (2005 and earlier) so that I have over 100 “new” posts here (an additional 12.5%) in the last 24 hours.

Those who are curious can poke around my archives, but I suspect that I will be the only person who recognizes any benefit from this. I will be tagging and categorizing those posts (since tagging was non-existant and my categories from multiple blogs are disorganized) but I have all the old blog posts here now that I am ever likely to get (I would say all of them, but I leave open the possibility that some have been lost in all the shuffling). I will also be going through my journals and making some old journal entries available here as I see fit so my archives are going to start stretching into the past – potentially as far back as 1980. (That’s about when my earliest journal entries are – I don’t know yet what I will be making available.)

Categories
meta

Two Years (By One Way of Reckoning)

Last year I recorded my first year back to blogging. I recorded the statistics at the time and set a goal to average one post per day. In the last year I have:

  • 365 posts
  • 1364 comments
  • ~20,000 spam comments (the spam count got reset when I upgraded to WP 2.5 so the count listed is 9100)

I have more posts this year than comments last year, more comments this year than spam comments last year, and obviously more spam comments (I’d hate to be ignored by the spammers). I have also imported posts and comments from before my 8 month blogging hiatus so my totals right now are 735 posts and 1749 comments (as a future point of reference).

I do not anticipate reporting statistics yearly, but anytime I do choose to do an anniversary post in the future I will mark the anniversary on June 23rd (the day I first started blogging in 2004) rather than August 14th. It’s been very rewarding to see more people commenting and helping to refine my thinking. Thanks.

Categories
life

Family Vacation

I’m trying to decide if my expectations are delusional, or simply higher than necessary.

This week I am taking an extended family vacation for the first time since I got married. There have been a few gathering similar to this which we have been unable to attend, but mostly our extended family events are holiday gatherings that stop short of vacations for us (since they are often close to where we live). In planning for this vacation I anticipated that I would not do a lot of blogging, but since blogging really is invigorating for me I did expect to keep it up a little bit over the week.

Now I come to the end of Wednesday and I have not even glanced at the news or thought of something that I could write about. I had things to write on Sunday, but I was too busy getting ready. Since then, the only reason I have even been able to check my email daily is that I am trying to secure a lovely house that we saw on Saturday.

Were my expectations to high, or will other trips allow me to do some blogging during the vacation?

Categories
life meta technology

Old Goals, New Goals

I have made a goal ever six months for the last couple of years to review every talk from general conference before the next general conference. I have to make the goal anew each conference because each time I fail – until now. Thanks to my introduction to ScriptureCast I reviewed the final talk from the October 2007 conference this morning. ScriptureCast allows you to create custom podcasts from the scriptures (and the last conference or two) where you set the starting point and completion date and it generates a podcast for you. They don’t have the Bible but I hope they are working to add it – though I have no information about whether they are or not. it’s nice to finally meet that goal – just in time to start over again (as soon as this week’s conference gets added).

I have been trying, with pretty good success, to be consistent at writing here. I had hope of ensuring that my blog would be consistent enough to hold the interest of those who read it, and attract responses to continue refining my thinking. At one point I had an average of more than 2 comments for every post on the blog. That may not sound like much to some people, but considering the large number of posts from when I started the blog where there was nobody to respond I felt pretty good about that. Then I went through and added something above 100 posts from my earlier blogging and the comment count was again well below the 2:1 ratio I had achieved – I’m almost back to that ration thanks to much feedback from a half a dozen regular readers.

I have recently recognized that I have been holding back somewhat because of that relatively arbitrary goal (the 2:1 comment ratio). I have avoided writing about things that don’t feel very current or likely to generate some interest. I have decided that being picky is not my strong suit and I would like to make more strides on another goal that I had made – to go through all the founding documents (especially the Federalist Papers). I have decided to push for two posts per day until I achieve that goal – one covering Federalist papers, and another like what I have been posting regularly (that way I won’t put off studying one of the Federalist papers just because I saw something interesting to write. Hopefully that study will make my other writing and thinking deeper and more grounded in principle.

Wish me luck.

Categories
culture technology

Open Up on Blogger

This is an open suggestion to Bloggers who use Blogger – specifically those who are restrictive on allowing comments.

Once upon a time there were three options for who could comment (assuming that you allowed comments on the blog in the first place). The options were Anyone, Registered Users, and Members of the Blog. I can understand the drawbacks of allowing anyone to comment but not everyone uses blogger – that makes for less than ideal choices to be made.

Recently there has been a new option added. Registered users used to mean people with blogger accounts but that has become “Users with Google Accounts.” The new “Registered Users” option allows people to use WordPress, TypePad, AIM/AOL, or LiveJournal identities to make comments. This is nice because users like me are no longer forced to use a defunct identity to comment. Please consider using the new “Registered Users” option if you currently only allow Users with Google Accounts.

Categories
life meta

Seeking Feedback

As I have been reorganizing my site and evaluating my purposes I have come to realize that one of the goals I have for this endeavor is to get feedback – to bounce my ideas off other people to see what they think and get some perspective on the topics I am thinking about.  For my part, I could do better at writing consistently.

Writing consistently is not just a matter of how frequently I post, but also a matter of posting my real thoughts on things that interest me. Sometimes I have failed by not posting. Other times I have failed by posting hollow and trivial things. I think I have started to do better lately on both counts. I am hopeful that I will continue to do better as a result of this mental spring-cleaning I have been doing.

Outside of myself, the bouncing ideas off of people does not work without responses. I am not looking to become the next Daily Kos with scores of comments on every post or anything like that but I would like to have feedback like I had two years ago when I was blogging in my PhD program. I figure that if I had even five readers who would leave comments or trackbacks on a semi-regular basis then I would probably have some feedback on the majority of my ideas and would be able to glean the insights that come from a conversation. So consider this to be an invitation to comment, even small comments to help my thinking grow outside my own brain. You may also consider it an invitation to share my posts with anyone else who might be interested in what I am talking about.

Categories
meta

What is Blogging?

Start of Series

In order to substantiate my claim of what benefits blogging provides for me, I think it is important to define what I mean by when I talk about blogging.

I have already indicated that blogging is more than simply posting thoughts here. Part of blogging, for me, is reading other blogs and commenting on things that other people are posting. I read a wide range of blogs, ranging from personal journals, to political commentary across the political spectrum. My most important criteria for choosing blogs to follow is that they must be generally thoughtful. In other words, I don’t follow blogs which consist of nothing but rants on some subject. Nor do I follow blogs that have an extreme agenda. Some might have a purpose, or a focus, but they do not spout the “Doctrine of Open Source Software” (or any other cause) with their eyes shut to the limitations of their professed agenda.

Although I have less control over this aspect, I also find it very useful to receive comments on the things that I post. This helps to refine my thinking and sometimes to expose me to a new point of view. This was driven home to me recently as I received comments from a few people out of the blue. I have no idea how they found my blog, but they left comments which provoked my thinking.

Because I no longer make use of trackback in my blogging, I rarely make comments on my blog with thoughts I have had from things that other people have posted. This means that I have to get my material from other sources. Those other sources are my own experience and current events. A lack of current events (at least, current events I wanted to comment about) is what led me to start thinking about this current series. As I faced days where I felt there was little to say I began to consider – should I force myself to say something, or should I just let the day slide?

So that is how I define blogging, it is a process of ingesting information, processing that information, and then constraining my thoughts to the confines of written language where I invite others to critique what I have posted.

Categories
meta

Benefits of Blogging

Start of Series

When I started blogging, I noticed that there were a lot of people blogging about blogging, especially in the circle of educational bloggers. Very soon I began to dislike those types of postings. This leaves readers here to wonder – why am I doing the same thing now?

In the past few months of blogging, and especially the last two weeks, I have had times where I was not sure what I wanted to post, but I wanted to post. That left me asking what it was I was trying to accomplish by blogging.

The answer to that question was that I wanted the benefits of blogging which, according to my definition of blogging, are an increased capacity for thinking and communicating. That may sound like a very generous description of the benefits, but I believe it is true for the type of blogging that I try to do.

Categories
meta

Why Blog?

This is going to be short, and almost without substance, but my history of blogging comes from a background of education where the question has been asked, but never completely answered, what is the benefit of blogging?

I can only answer that question in regard to my personal experience. Even with that limited scope it will probably take more than one post to answer, so expect a series of posts trying to answer the question, “What is the benefit of blogging, from an educational perspective?” I expect to write about why I blog, how I blog, and what benefits I have seen. I might even throw in a post about how my experience might be generalized for other people. I might even take the time to define what I mean when I talk about blogging (hint: it’s more than just posting things here).

Categories
life meta

Blogging or Thinking

I made a little discovery yesterday about the pattern of when I post to my blog and when I don’t. It comes down to the “Time Matrix” discussed in Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey. The time matrix suggests that all activities and concerns can be broken down into four quadrants. Quadrants one and two are labeled “important” while quadrants three and four are labeled “unimportant” Quadrants one and three are labeled “urgent” while two and four are “not urgent.” The idea is that we should spend our time in quadrants one and two instead of the natural tendency to focus on quadrants one and three. Quadrant three “urgent/unimportant” is full of things that grab your attention which can be ignored, like a ringing telephone. Quadrant three is the reason we invent things like caller-id.

When I am busy thinking about things in quadrant one I tend to miss writing in my blog. I get buried in thinking about the problem at hand and do not take the time to relax and filter my thoughts through the lens of language. I missed a week when I thought I was going to be getting a very nice job because I did not want to write about the company and then have nothing come of it. I missed this weekend because I was thinking about how to address the conundrum of responding to a job offer while waiting on a second possible offer. Ideally I would be able to get both offers and make a decision. So far I have been stuck with one offer and the second employer has been delayed by some vague internal emergencies. I solved that by coming to an agreement with the first employer. We set a date for me to make a decision with or without the second offer.

So there it is. When I am not blogging, it is probably because I am stuck in quadrant one.