Blogging

Blogging Insights — A Perfect Moment

Fandango11 Comments

For her weekly Blogging Insights prompts, Dr. Tanya provides us with a quote about blogging or writing and asks us to express our opinion about said quote.

This week’s quote is unattributed. Dr. Tanya wrote “…blogger Fandango will probably call it another ‘fortune cookie statement.’” Not wanting to disappoint Tanya…

When I see this quote in makes me think of the old adage, “There’s no time like the present.” That essentially means that the best time to do something is right now. Don’t procrastinate, don’t put off until tomorrow what you should do today. Who can argue with that?

But being the nit-picker that I am, I’m going to focus on the work “perfect.” For something to be perfect, it must be free from faults or defects. I, for one, don’t seek perfection in my life because I’d be setting myself up for disappointment. Call me jaded, but I truly believe that nothing in this world is free from faults or defects. Not people, not things, not lives.

Right now I’m in bed with a bad cold and I’m tapping this out on my iPhone. The conditions are far from perfect, but I feel that the best time to respond to Dr. Tanya’s prompt is right now because I’m awake, although as soon as I finish posting this, I’ll probably close my eyes and try to get some much needed sleep.

Of course I may come back and read this later and think I must have been delirious with fever when I wrote it. But maybe that’s what people think when they read most of my posts.

Sheesh!

Fandango15 Comments

“Oorie.”
“Errantry.”
Whoever heard of such words?
What nature of jargon are they?
I don’t want to create a tempest in a teapot,
But such words throw me into a morass.
I try to respond to these daily word prompts
As best I can.
I attempt to craft stories around the chosen words
That will entice readers
To visit my world of imagination.
But then little known, rarely used words
Show up in my reader
Like the many arches
In a mind blowing Escher print.
And I am thrown for a loss.
Do these premiere prompters
Who give us daily inspiration
Lack compassion
For the plight of us responders
When they toss us such words?

Sheesh!

Written for these daily prompts: Ragtag Daily Prompt (oorie), Word of the Day Challenge (errantry), E.M’s Random Word Prompt (jargon), JusJoJan (tempest), Your Daily Word Prompt (morass), The Daily Spur (arch), Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (premiere), and My Vivid Blog (compassion).

Past My Prime

Fandango36 Comments
Warning: this post is of no interest to anyone else besides me, so if you’re not me, feel free to skip it.

I reached my prime in 2019 and it’s been downhill since then. And by “I reached my prime,” I’m talking about my blog.

According to the totally reliable and completely accurate WordPress stats, my blog received more than 178,000 views in 2019. It had almost 49,500 visitors, received more than 53,500 likes and 21,500 comments.

In 2020, my views dropped by 4%, down to just over 171,300. Visitors were up slightly, at 51,200, but likes and comments were both down to 47,276 and 20,616, respectively.

And in 2021, views dropped again, to just under 153,000, which was a whopping 11% drop! Visitors were down to only 44,100, but while likes were up to 52,278, comments dropped ever so slightly to 20,428.

I acknowledge that I wrote more posts in 2019 than I did in 2020 or 2021. But I published 45 more posts this past year than I did in 2020, yet still had far fewer views! What the hell?

Anyway, who, other than me, cares? Still, in a totally egotistical move, here are my top five posts in terms of views, exclusive of my prompts, my about page, and my archives, in 2021. You know, just in case you have absolutely nothing better to do today.

1. Fix Your Avatar

2. Free Speech

3. Damn You, WordPress

4. Insurrection in America, which was posted one year ago today, by the way

5. Do You Read Me?

Blogging Insights — My Expert Opinion

Fandango9 Comments

For her weekly Blogging Insights prompts, Dr. Tanya provides us with a quote about blogging or writing and asks us to express our opinion about said quote.

This week’s quote is unattributed.

“The expert in everything was once a beginner.”

Perhaps I’m being a bit picayune, but I have an issue with the phrase “expert in everything.” An expert is a person who has a comprehensive and authoritative knowledge of or skill in a particular area. No one can be an “expert in everything.” So let’s alter the quote to be:

“The expert in anything was once a beginner.”

With that out of the way, I agree that no one starts out as an expert in anything. We all start out as beginners and for those who do become experts — and not all beginners become “experts” — they acquire the requisite knowledge, learn their craft, hone their skills, and eventually may develop an expertise in a specific field.

In the context of blogging, one doesn’t have to be an expert to be a good blogger. But one must know how to use basic grammar, spelling, sentence structure, and punctuation. Nor does one have to be a computer expert. Blog hosting sites like WordPress make it relatively easy to set up and maintain a blog.

But even being a good technical writer and leveraging the best blogging technology isn’t enough. Being a good blogger requires imagination, creativity, wit, and an ability to weave a story, be it fiction or non-fiction.

And that is my “expert” opinion on today’s quote..

Blogging Insights — Piece of Cake

Fandango10 Comments

For her weekly Blogging Insights prompts, Dr. Tanya provides us with a quote about blogging or writing and asks us to express our opinion about said quote.

This week’s quote seems to me to be another fortune cookie-like quote:

I don’t agree with this quote that nothing worth doing is ever easy. I object to the words “nothing” and “ever.” I think there are some things worth doing that are easy. Or at least, aren’t that hard.

Maybe I’ve led a charmed life, but most of the things that I considered worth doing came fairly easily to me. Or maybe that’s because I decided somewhere along the way that if something didn’t come easily to me, it probably wasn’t worth my doing it. Yeah, that just might be the case.

But since this prompt is supposed to be focused on writing and blogging, let me respond in that specific context. I always felt that I was a decent writer and that writing was pretty easy for me. I was also fairly computer savvy back in the day, so when I first started blogging in 2005, I was able to figure my way around the mechanics of blogging platforms (first Blogger, then TypePad, and then WordPress) fairly easily.

Well, until WordPress foisted the block editor on us. I resisted the block editor for a long time because it was different and, in my opinion, difficult. But ultimately I gave in and decided that I either had to embrace the block editor or leave WordPress (or stop blogging altogether). And once I made that decision, I found that it wasn’t so bad and now I can’t imagine going back to the classic editor again. Who knew?