Say hello to my new baby blog. Here it is. After trying out a handful this one seemed the simplest. The whole process has been harder than I thought. It has taken me 4 days, including this one. I never thought it would take so long. Understandably if I had created the website myself it would make sense but these were WordPress templates created by someone else. It shouldn’t take that long. Wrong.
My previous blog was not adequate. It’s still there if anyone wanted to dip into it but it was limited in what I could do. So I had to change. People were asking me why the RSS feed didn’t work. I had just signed up to Twitter and found that other websites had links to Twitter accounts. I started reading and reading; and realized if I wanted a RSS feed that worked, a link to my Twitter account and many other options available out there I had to change. And I had to change very soon before the posts added up. I wish I knew an easy way to transport the past posts from the last 4 months. But in the end I just left it be.
So these last 4 days I’ve signed up to: -
- Google Reader for my iMac and iPhone. Being able to read articles from sites I’m interested in all in one place while on the move and away from my iMac has been invaluable.
- Twitter for my iMac and iPhone. It was a bit strange at first because you’re thinking what can I tweet about that would interest anyone. At first I had my tweets protected. There’s that fear of everything you tweet being all over the Internet but I retracted it and now anyone can ‘follow’ me. You have to get used to people, total strangers, following you, unfollow you and even tweet you. As of this minute, I have 10 followers. A small number but still, it’s all still a bit freaky. It can be unnerving but I’m getting used to it. And after 4 days, it’s a better way to keep in touch. It’s not perceived as rude, you can’t really be offended with the words allowed, to send someone a short message.
- New blog. The new blog allows me more room to play around with what I can put on the blog. As I don’t have books out I don’t need a proper website yet that requires other web pages. The ‘About’ page that I had in my old website I condensed into a few words and they’re on my blog. The other web pages can be set up later.
Before typing this post, I found an article by the author Alan Orloff stating 7 things he’s learnt so far and the 5th point he made seemed quite appropriate to this post:
Online promotion takes a lot more time than you think. Website, blog, Google Reader, Facebook, Twitter, listservs, Yahoo groups, nings, and a kajillion other social sites lure you in and won’t let go. These connections are valuable, but you need to exercise discipline or you’ll look up and four hours will have elapsed with nothing to show for your “writing” time except a few Mafia War hits.
Unlike the process of writing, setting up a blog and working with its many facets eg plugins, widgets, code etc and moving things around has been frustrating for someone as clueless as I am but it has also been very addictive. Extremely. This beginning part I couldn’t do for a few hours a day. It consumed me.
Like with everything else on the Internet, the results could be seen immediately if you persevere. That’s why the high you get from getting it right can override that of tapping away slowly when you’re writing, plodding along, unsure if you’re writing anything good. Now that the blog is up and running, I have to remind myself that I have to get back to actual writing. This is my experience of being a corporation of one. Now that the bulk of the set up has been done, I just need to post and save, maintaining with a little oiling once in awhile without it swamping the main activity of writing. Hopefully.
; ?>/images/arrow2.gif)
(
I’d like to be all “you have to write...