Saturday, September 7, 2013

49 posts and counting!

This is actually my 53rd post. It's been an interesting jump into the blogging waters, and I'm still treating it as an experiment. The accompanying picture shows a grid of roughly 49 (7 squared) blog pictures that I have used so far. The rough part is that I added a few extra to stand in for the first six entries that I posted without pictures. In that time, I've had about 5,500 page views. That's over 100 views/post which pales by comparison with the long time bloggers out there, but is a lot more than I expected at this point.

So far, I have attempted to (or learned to) follow a formula for my posts so as to make it a manageable task. The formula is a constraint in the same sense as a haiku or a twitter post are bound by the rules of their media. My constraints are:
  1. Keep it to two paragraphs.
  2. If the writing must be longer than two paragraphs, span it over more than one post.
  3. Each post should be (mostly) self-contained.
  4. Include a photo with every post. In my case, they are always square.
  5. Legos make great actors for quick photo shoots.
  6. Write one day, edit on a second sitting, and post on a third.
I probably have others... (My students joke about the fact that I always toss certain phrases into my writing as a matter of course, and I'm sure that I have done the same in my posts.)

As to the look of the blog itself, I have modified it slowly over time. I figure that I need to have enough content to make it useful to navigate. With over 49 posts, I might finally be hitting such a tipping point. I like simple, clean and modern styles. I chose white on black because it's easier for *me* to read, and it emphasizes signal to background. So it was natural for me to use the current style from the blogger defaults.

Entering the fourth paragraph, you can see that I habitually violate my own rules...  And this leads me to my request: Please send suggestions for additional (or different) constraints on blog writing that you think are interesting or fun. Please also suggest how I should better style this blog.

And thank you for reading! My wife still doesn't read my blog.



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