Blogging Platform

Blogging Platform — Controversial? Who, Me?

Fandango5 Comments

While Dr. Tanya, who hosts Blogging Insights, is on a hiatus, Sadje thought that she could host discussions about our experiences and expectations regarding blogging on the Blogging Platform prompt.

Today’s topic is about having your blog work copied or stolen by other bloggers and presented as their own work.

Sadje asks…

Has this happened to you ever? And if it did, hope did you deal with this?

Fortunately, outside of the 2019 Tygpress incident that Sadje mentioned, I’m not aware of this happening very often, but I can’t say with any certainty that it hasn’t, in fact, happened to me.

I know there are some blogs that mostly reblog other bloggers’ posts, but at least they credit the blogger who originated the post and they also link back to the original blogger to notify him or her that their post has been reposted on this other site. They are not asking permission to repost my post, but as long as I’m credited for the original, I guess I’m okay with that.

Sometimes, in responding to a writing prompt, I will read another blogger’s post and think it is very similar to what I wrote. But hey, there are only so many ways to interpret a photo or respond to a prompt, so that’s the way it is.

Of course, if the “similar” post was written using the exact same wording that I used, that might raise my suspicions. Similar us one thing. Verbatim is quite another thing.

Blogging Platform — Looking Ahead

Fandango4 Comments

While Dr. Tanya, who hosts Blogging Insights, is on a hiatus, Sadje thought that she could host discussions about our experiences and expectations regarding blogging on Blogging Platform.

Today’s topic is the pre-scheduling feature of WordPress, and Sadje wants to know…

Do you pre-scheduling your posts ahead of time? What has been your experience regarding this convenience?

I pre-schedule all of my prompt posts. For my daily Fandango’s One Word Challenge (FOWC), I create the posts typically one to two weeks ahead. For my other prompts — now down to two: Fandango’s Story Starter and Fandango’s Friday Flashback — I generally try to schedule them anywhere between one to three days ahead of their post dates.

I also use the scheduler to post some of my prompt responses in advance. For example, I wrote my response to Linda G. Hill’s One-Liner Wednesday prompt yesterday and it’s scheduled to post tomorrow morning. I also typically craft my response to Jim Adams’ Song Lyric Sunday on Saturday and schedule it to publish at 3:00 am Sunday morning.

Bottom line, the pre-scheduling function serves a valuable purpose and I use it to help me manage my blog, especially since I post multiple times a day.

Blogging Platform — Media Matters

Fandango12 Comments

While Dr. Tanya, who hosts Blogging Insights is on a hiatus, Sadje thought that she could host discussions about our experiences and expectations regarding blogging on Blogging Platform.

Today’s topic is images on blog posts and Sadje suggests…

Do use images on your blog, but keep an eye on your media storage space?

I use at least one image with each post I publish. And yes, I’m cognizant of the sizes of my images because I want to make sure that I don’t run out of media storage space in my Media folder.

I blog exclusively on my iPhone. Photos I take on my iPhone 12 Pro Max can be up to 12 megapixels in size. Each of those photos can take two or more megabytes of storage in the WordPress Media folder. My understanding is that on the new iPhone 15 Pro Max, photos can be up to 48 megapixels. That’s huge!

My solution is to resize my photos and images before I post them. There is an iPhone app I use called “Resize,” and resizing photos or images is what it does. I use it mostly to shrink the size of my photos I’m using in my posts.

Let me illustrate. Earlier today I used an image I created using Bing’s AI image creator. When I saved it to my iPhone’s Photo folder, it was 1 megapixel (not too bad), but it would have taken up a whopping 2.4 megabytes of storage space in my WordPress Media folder.

I opened up the Resize app and reduced the size of the photo from 1286 x 1286 megapixels to 640 x 640 megapixels. It’s a snap to use.

As a result, the resized image was reduced from 2.4 megabytes to 57 kilobytes. That’s a huge reduction in the space that the image takes up in your Media folder.

I started this blog in May 2017, 6 years and 4 months ago. My Media folder has almost 9,500 images. Because I shrink my images before posting them, I’ve only used 2.8 gigabytes of the 13 gigabytes, or less than 20% of the storage allowed under my plan.

So, to go back to Sadje’s question, I am not at all concerned about storage capacity in my Media folder. Because, as long as I continue to shrink my images, I’ll die long before I run out of media storage space.