Time to update the description. WSV50 fencer since 2004. Mostly recovered from two meniscus tears in 2006 (not fencing related) and other minor injuries. Focused on improving fencing skills and avoiding injuries. Goal is to qualify for the WSV60 team in 2012.
I've been trying to figure out how to revamp my blog/live journal/web pages/myspace etc. into a more effective method of tracking what I want to track and ranting in the appropriate places versus spilling across all venues.
I started with a web page back in the days when it was considered odd for anyone to have a web page. I used text editors and my own HTML coding and FTP for uploading and downloading and thus updated the site almost daily with stuff that no one cared about but me.
Fast forward a few years and suddenly more people had their web pages and there seemed to be some kind of competition for developing the spiffiest web pages with graphics, animation, and cutsie little things that sometimes gave me headaches when I viewed the pages. [Content, people! Where's the content?] Friends started adding award pages to their sites where they listed all the awards they'd won for the design of their web pages and I slugged along, coding in text editors and keeping it simple, the way I liked it.
One friend added a comment page to his site where people could type in comments upon his weekly journal. [Yes, by now all my friends were posting a [usually] daily update on their lives, their thoughts, etc. and since most of these were writer friends, most of them were worth reading.] I joined the not-a-web-ring web ring and linked to friends' journal pages and they linked to mine but I still didn't get into web design until...
The dark star approached.
Okay. It wasn't a dark star. It was something called a BLOG. People were no longer talking about typing in a page in the morning and uploading it to their web site. They were talking about some great new service where you could just type it in and it was online immediately. It was free. It was fun. Everyone should do this.
No thank you. CompuServe and Genie were sufficient time sinks for me. I hung out with my writer friends there and had many good (and some not-so-good) conversations, made a few short story sales by networking, and generally viewed it as an aid to my part-time job of writing.
Then Genie was sold to some company with visions of... well... something. All my writer friends bailed out and most moved to the internet to www.sff.net I settled in and eventually used their services to host my web page where I kept my occasional journal about life, the universe, and happiness and ignored all those little blog services popping up. I took a web design course and added pictures and frames but I refused to even think about trying to make my page interactive or join the exodus of friends who'd abandoned their webs to go blogging.
Then an acquaintance died and several of my writer friends announced they were getting together to talk about her life at livejournal.com. Registration was free. What would it hurt?
Sigh!
Falling off the diet always begins with that one little bite and the question, "What would it hurt?"
I have too many scattered pages now and while each one is supposed to be for a specific purpose, the problem is that they are all little more than diluted versions of the original simple little daily journal that I used to keep online so distant friends and I could keep up with one another's lives.
I've lost track of most of the people whose journals I used to read because they're now blogging under names that have nothing to do with their real life and I cannot find them. I've tried blogging in the same places and it's just not working for me because I forget what I've said where or even which journal is for what.
And when I start rambling like this, I tend to ramble wherever I am instead of rambling about blogs in, for example, my livejournal account versus the fencing blog which is supposed to be about fencing.
It is supposed to be about fencing, isn't it?
So I'm looking at consolidating my blogging locations. Explicitly, I've abandoned Myspace for everything except reading. (Because that's where my children post about events in their lives and it's easier to read there than to call them up and say, "Hello? This is your mother. Are you still alive? Why don't you ever call me?")
My Livejournal is friends only and I seldom post.
I'm going to redo my web pages and revive my old hand-coded, simple little journal and use it for posting daily stuff. I'm probably not going to post as much here unless I think I have something worth saying (like talking about a competition, for example).
Really, how many people want to read about me kneeling on the floor in my closet and icing my elbow? This is not fun stuff.
We have English composition courses that teach us how to write creatively and Business writing courses for our work life. I think maybe it's time we started offering courses on how to Blog effectively without boring your potential audience.
And now I'll stop boring everyone about this. I hope.
10-26-2007 09:58 AM