In a few recent threads, I’ve seen posters mention their blogs. Do you have a blog? What do you write about? How long have you been blogging and why did you start? Is it a themed blog or just a collection of personal musings? Is it for business or for pleasure?
Do you want to share your blog with the Doperverse so we can all enjoy each other’s work?
This has gotten the moderator Stamp Of Approvalsup[/sup], so no worries about getting in trouble for shameless self-promotion.
I’ll start, so nobody’s shy about being first: my blog, Antijenic Drift, started as a way to keep my faraway family and friends up to date on my adventures in my new house and new life in the United States, and it’s slowly turning into a random collection of recipes, book reviews, and little adventures. I love doing it, even though there’s no way I could ever quit my day job and live off my blogging revenue - I don’t pretend it’s anything awesome, but it’s fun for me to work on. I consider it a hobby and I try to post to it a few times a week.
I was considering starting one sometime maybe this year. It would be about overcoming self sabotage. Basically it would have been the page that I would have liked to have found when I read through the first 4 search pages when I googled “self sabotage” or overcoming it. I didn’t find anything that really helped me. However I am still failing to overcome it so not sure if I am the expert on the subject just yet.
One thing I would like to ask, how do people make money from them? Some joke blogs I have read might mention the writer is blogging full time. Is that just from ads? and maybe selling t shirts with the best jokes on them? can you really make that much money from that? Or are there other ways I don’t know about
I’m onto my third blog. One (now closed) was to keep track of a charity trip round Europe a few years ago. Ten countries in under a fortnight in a car that cost us less than £500. The descent of the Splugen Pass in a car with barely any brakes was an adventure in itself.
Blog 2 (Open but not being updated) was to keep track of maintenance on my motorbike (Honda ST1300) and to share ideas. It’s not really had an update in a couple of years, but it’s still getting regular hits, mainly on how to fit intercom or heated grips.
Blog 3 (live) is being kept as the journal I’m supposed to keep as part of the process of becoming a minister in the Church of Scotland.
There’s nothing much exciting on either of them. In my experience, blogs that make it past the third post will last for a while, but there’s plenty out there that have died at post 3.
My blog Hearing Sparks is about hearing loss and my life as a 25-year-old who is deaf. It has a lot of geekiness, some crafts, general musings and other information. It’s a lot of fun to write.
I have a blog I started this past spring about our infertility treatments and issues. I think I started during our second IUI. Link is here: Struggles With Infertility.
I have a blog I’ve been puttering around with since late 2009. I go in erratic bursts; sometimes I post several times a week; other times I let weeks lapse before I’m inspired. I wish I could be more regular. Maybe I’d actually get some followers. As it is, I’ve just got my friends, plus a very few others who’ve stumbled upon me one way or another. At the moment I appear to be the internet’s foremost authority on an obscure print called The Hung Jury.
I wish! I tried “monetizing” a while back with Google AdSense and couldn’t really figure it out, plus I only have a dozen or so visits a week, definitely not enough to make it worth any extra effort on that front. I keep thinking that if I could narrow my focus to something specific, I’d have more “success”, but I really enjoy just posting about whatever is going on. I try not to make it too much like a LiveJournal or a diary, so when a lot of personal stuff is going on I tend to slow down a lot in my posting. If I was really dedicated, I’d stack up a pile of extra posts to keep handy for those times, but I’m not nearly that good.
Thank you all for sharing! I’m already enjoying reading everyone’s blogs and adding them to my Google Reader so I don’t miss any updates.
Those of you using WordPress… do you like it? I’m with Blogspot because it was easy for a newbie to figure out, but I’m thinking about moving over to a different site.
I started a blog this year on Opening Day of the baseball season. My team had lost 15-10. Everyone in Cleveland was SO down about the team - just like they had been the season before. I was/am very sick of the negative attitude around the Indians and hearing people complain for the sake of complaining when they don’t know the first thing about what is going on on the field.
Anyway, my blog is one post per game touting all of the exciting and positive things that happened during the game, win or loss.
The team has been quite good this year, better than expected, so it hasn’t been that hard to come up with something good to say every day. But then I really love baseball so it’s not hard for me to get excited as it is.
I also post funny/interesting quotes from the radio broadcast of each game, which is unusual I think.
It’s been fun so far but actually a bit of work. An extra 3-4 hours of listening intently to the game every night so I can write down the radio quotes as they come. If I miss a game due to life, I have to listen to the radio archive the next day.
I don’t mind it tho, since I don’t have a life and I love to listen to the games anyway!
Well, my blog link is in my sig, it’s mostly about my writing and trying to network with other blogging writers, but I also blog about fandom conventions, fanart, and random stuff happening in my life.
I like wordpress very well and have found it very easy, but I do miss a few features that Blogspot has, mostly how easy it is for people to follow a Blogspot site through the blogger.com dashboard, and the ‘Army of followers’ widget that most blogspotters have with a thumbnail picture for the first X many followers in the list.
The wordpress.com equivalent is subscribing, but that’s more private - there’s no way to show logos for all the people who’ve subscribed, though you can find details about them in your site dashboard.
Yep (see sig line). I write about my dementia, my daily life dealing with it, new symptoms, and, as I am an Alzheimer’s Advocate (I have always had a problem with that word “advocate”. It makes it sounds like I am advocating Alzheimer’s Disease, doesn’t it?;)), I keep up with legislation and new research results.
I think people visit it just to see what bat-shitted thing I’ve done lately, such as going into the ladies restroom, asking where the goddam urinals were and then using a toilet with a woman standing there with her mouth agape.
I talk about all of it and try to keep it light-hearted and my friends here know that they can joke with me anytime about it.
The most recent thing I talked about had to do with a stain on my ceiling that looked like a penis and one of them (forgot which one) mentioned my “penile dementia”.
I’d like to find out about your life. I’ll check out your blog!
I only have used Wordpress, but I have found it very easy to use. I’ve make bloggie friends with other Wordpressers, and have managed to install various widgets without very much trouble. It’s just something else to learn and get used to, in my view. I think the themes Wordpress offers are a little more elegant, but I admit I haven’t thoroughly compared the two.
This is a bad thread. Bad bad bad bad bad. Super bad.
I have homework to do, you know. I can’t be spending all my time reading! Antigen I started at the beginning of yours. I’m up to December, um, last year I think. I have to go to bed but your recipes and talk about work and home are interesting and I don’t want to. But, I’m sick and need my sleep. So I will be responsible and go to bed. You need to write about work more, like the guy who writes about working in a pharmacy and the stripper who writes about dancing. Not only will it make more people aware of your career, it’ll keep me entertained.
But I have to know…
What kind of hand cream? EmAnJ I finished yours already. I’m so sorry what you’re going through. You and your sister.
StarsApart I’ll be reading yours when I’m done with Antigen’s. Sounds interesting.
I don’t have one so I can’t share. I’ve considered it but I never get around to it. In the meantime, I’ll live vicariously through you guys while I pretend that I don’t have a bunch of homework to do.
I started my first blog a few of months ago. I write about miscellaneous things that strike me as interesting or unusual, particularly quirks of history or science. I like writing but my motivation varies enormously, so the blog is primarily a means of motivating me to write regularly. My aim is to post a minimum of once a week for twelve months. Hopefully, by then I will have developed a habit.
I didn’t intend for my site to be a blog at the outset, but it’s often described that way - as it details the things I do/think.
It’s AtomicShrimp.com - and it covers my rather disparate set of personal interests, including foraging, food, crafting and a few bits of other random hobbyish stuff.
Mine is Semaphore for Ducks!
At the moment moving work premises has meant that I haven’t been posting much recently but it’s now the Edinburgh Festival and I really should be posting more about stuff going on.
It’s not got any particular theme… just stuff I’ve done, usually. There are links to my work blog and also to Flickr (where my book ‘covers and comments’ are) from it, too.
It’s mostly about trying to live a healthy lifestyle - both physically and psychologically. While the main focus of the website is healthy diet and exercise, I blog a lot about coping with depression and making positive changes in my life. Everyone is so kind and validating there. It’s my happy place.
My blog revolves around reading, writing, and tea – with some miscellany thrown in here and there. I’ve only been at it for a few months.
The “Writing” part is the most active, with lots of stuff about being a writer. For some reason, I’ve written a lot about book signings lately.
The “Reading” part is mostly book reviews and commentary on the world of bookselling from the owner of an indie bookstore.
The “Tea” part is about … well … tea. Not much in there yet, but I’m definitely going to ramp it up. I may split it out into a separate blog. Haven’t decided that yet. Is it better to have two more-focused blogs that get 1-2 posts per week, or one less-focused blog that gets 3-4 posts per week?
The “Random Thoughts” section covers things like cancer (been through it twice), rodeos, beer, Greg Mortenson, and medical marijuana. The theme is obvious, right?
I started out with a fully hand-coded blog written in PHP and MySQL. That turned out to be too much work, so I played around with a couple of pre-built tools. I settled on WordPress because it does almost everything I want it to do and it’s free.
I would welcome feedback if any of you decide to peruse it.
