Do you ever wonder where people blog?

Do you ever wonder how they write a post? [...]

Why? When? Where? How? Do you blog?

I blog right here:

At a desk set in one corner of my bedroom. Yes, I know it’s very cluttered. Which probably explains a lot of my life and why my blog goes unupdated. The pile, one of a few in my room, represents projects or tasks I have yet to complete.

But I never get around to them because I spend most of my time trying to catch up with all the social media updates: Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Livejournal, Youtube, and deviantArt when I can remember. (I’m a year behind on dA. *shame*) This by itself doesn’t take up much time, to be honest. But a lot of links are posted for such interesting articles or news items or random knowledge, I get stuck reading and reading and … reading …

After that on my list of priorities (which is topped by tv, sadly) is writing up my backlog of trips to Disneyland for my personal account. (The count is currently 15 trips over the past 8 or 9 months, waurrgh!)

At the end is writing at least one entry a month for my blog. I have a tiny list of ideas for blog entries. They are so unwieldy and require so much time to write, however, that I usually skip writing about them and go with the most recent idea that’s been floating around in my head for a couple weeks.

There’s no real process to writing for my blog. I just decide that Today Is the Day and I shouldn’t (or can’t!) put it off any longer, and I spend an hour or two writing. I don’t have drafts stored on my blog (mostly because WordPress’ storage of drafts as completely separate from and filling up the same database slots as published posts irks me), and I don’t write much of anything beforehand. It’s partially laziness and partially lack of time, but I think it’s mostly because when I do write out or plan out blog entries in my head, like during long commutes home from work, the thought or idea leaves my system, and I no longer feel a compulsion to post it up here.

That’s about it. Boring, I know. But I managed to fit in my “real” post for March! Yeah!

What I wanted: A simple backup of all my tweets from my account and all my favorited tweets of others.

What I kept finding: Integrate Twitter into WordPress! Widget! Cross-post! Update Twitter about new blog updates!

I was dazzled by wp-lifestream and briefly considered backing up all of my social networking accounts. That was until I saw over 500 files for the plugin queued up in my FTP program. I didn’t want a plugin that required almost as many files as the WordPress install itself! (Although someone says he’s working on cleaning up the plugin, wp-lifestream2, so I don’t know how it’ll end up.)

I wanted to try out Tweet Tweet but it requires registration at Twitter and acquiring OAuth? Too much hassle just for a simple archive. But I did really like the possibility of storing Twitter replies to me, and of archiving tables. (Not that I tweet that much, although my current 1500 WordPress entries seems a bit much for me.)

After I found these instructions how to import old Twitter favorites into WordPress, I finally decided on running the Twitter Importer plugin after using the Tweet Importer to import all of my old tweets (versus only the last 20 with Twitter Importer).

Two tips I could have used, instead of having to redo my original import:

One, set the default category to the type of tweet being imported, eg “My Tweets” versus “Favorite Tweets,” if you’d like the tweets separated into different categories.

Two, turn off allowing comments! No reason to leave myself open to spammenting on old tweets!

I’d consider this a good day’s work. Even though I didn’t get paid. (Not enough work at my job at the moment. Bah.)

Changed because I figured plaid and a holly sprig were not well suited to March or the following months.

I hope it’s a decent layout, because I missed Natalie Portman’s interview on the red carpet show in order to upload it! (Yeah, it’s taken me that long to update about it. Think how long it’ll take me to write entries about … whatever it was I’ve been bouncing around in my head for the past month that I can’t quite recall now. O_o)

(And woot! Natalie is now Academy Award-Winning Actor Natalie Portman, for the rest of her life, for ever and ever! XD)

New layout! Even though it’s been up for almost a month now. Inspired by some plaid I saw in a commercial a long while ago. I really tried to make a layout that didn’t look like I designed it, but I think all my little me-ish touches here and there make it fail in that regard. :o

Oh! And after ages and ages (a couple years, I think) my blog is back to the basic two-column setup. I was inspired by an old layout of mine. I still like that layout. One of the few from way back then that I still feel like sticking up here. hee! I like the simplicity of it, but it’s still attractive.

The current layout, I’m not so sure about, I always get stuck on wanting to use a light red-hued color for the background. Hopefully the color I settled on isn’t too offensive or too gross.

I also finally, finally, set it up so that the site stuff pages use the same layout as the main page. Just the About page, Colophon, all that. The Archives still have their own design… for my own reasons.

Anyway, I hope anyone reading this had a happy Christmastime or the holiday of your choosing, religious or not, and I hope your New Year’s goes well, and that 2011 will be a better year, whether or not 2010 was a good year for you.

The first obstacle I had to tackle was, what purpose does my blog serve? My mission statement claims I use it to write down thoughts. Okay that’s simple. Why do I find it so hard to write down my thoughts then?

Second obstacle, why do I keep up my blog? Other than my usual reasons: it’s my hobby, it gives me a website to maintain, I just like having a blog. I also thought it would be a good place to stretch my brain, since I’m not in college anymore and don’t need to write anything. Although I do really enjoy having finished school, no more working for someone else’s rating of my work! I thought I should still exercise my writing skills, make sure I can still do it if I ever need.

I had the what and the why established, so the last question was, Why do I feel so much pressure with my need to update at least once a month? Write one short little piece every thirty days, that couldn’t be as much of a strain as writing in school, certainly! Where was the stress coming from? My answer had to be that all the pressure and the stress was coming from me. This is a blog after all, meant to attract visitors and draw in attention. I couldn’t do that if I wrote poorly. Even though I hate that officious, stuffy voice my writings develop (even in this entry!), I continue doing it because I think it’s better suited to pleasing others.

But I don’t think I should do that. I have to tell myself, my blog is for me, I’m the one I have to please. I’m probably the one who reads through my archives the most, after all! Even after I take my blog off the web (Gasp! Unimaginable!), I’ll still keep a copy on my computer hard drive (and on my backup hard drive…) for me to look through occasionally.

With that said, a short review of my silly, but fun little purchase of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brashares is coming up!

[comments closed to combat spam]

It’s another gimmicky layout, a side-scrolling one. I’ve wanted to design one for a while now. Don’t know how long it’ll stay up though, I’ll probably get tired of it and redo it later.

I still don’t know if I like how I did the letters either. I keep messing with that… Overall, not as jazzed as I was when I put up the previous two layouts.

Also, why the heck did Internet Explorer mangle my previous layout so horribly? And why did I not know this until almost a year after I uploaded it? I thought IE was supposed to follow web standards by now. Augh! Even with the current layout, IE doesn’t like how I’m displaying my, uh, sidebar. (Firefox, Chrome, and Opera all show both layouts just fine…)

I’ve had ideas of stuff to write about, but I never managed to write a whole entry. I feel like that’s reflective of my life currently, that I have ideas and maybe I start things, but I never really do anything. I won’t go into that here, either.

Just wanted to say … I miss my blog, and I don’t want it to die yet. (Although based on search engine statistics and the amount of spam I’m getting [which is close to none], other people seem to think my blog is dead.)

Hmm, something interesting to say, I feel this entry is lacking. (In a lot of things…) I’m trying to read War and Peace again! Last time I tried was 2005 maybe? At least I got to the war part of the book this time.

I don’t even remember why I chose XHTML over HTML. Possibly I thought it was the wave of the future. Or maybe I thought all the cool kids used it. (Not really. :))

I guess I started using XHTML about five and a half years ago (“validation”). I didn’t even know what it really was! I still don’t. People commented on Jeffrey’s blog about the extensibility of XHTML, and while I’ve heard the term before, I never knew exactly what that meant, and I still don’t.

I know a little about XML; I had to do a small XML project for school and I thought it was nifty. (Although in my major it was more about JDF files, or job description flows? Something like that. A file that would travel with printing jobs and would contain information about how to print said job.) But beyond that I never got into XML and this extensibility gig. I didn’t understand how XML changed or could even make a difference with HTML.

Because of that, I’ve come to the conclusion that I really shouldn’t keep up with something that I’m not using to its fullest potential (and I should definitely take the mention of it off my resume o_o). All the work that I’ll have to put into removing trailing slashes from every webpage I wrote (including inserting some code into WordPress headers to strip the slashes out) is not a good enough reason for me to keep using XHTML.

I’ll get right on that. After I finish moving all my protected blog entries to a private blog, after I retag and recategorize all the remaining entries, after I tag all my Livejournal entries, after I tag all my dreams, yup. (Some projects that I’ve been working on for ever.) At least I’ll have a few years before HTML5 becomes a reality and I have to buckle down to transition to that.

Yes, I actually used bright colors in my layout! I carried out my threat (last paragraph) with my inspiration of “candy colors.” :3 Although I think the colors will bug me after a while … right now I think the pink and purple are too close on the color wheel, leaving the green as a glaring complement and the most eye-catching part of the design. Bah!

It’s interesting, I went to Colour Lovers when I first started in order to find my “candy colors,” but I couldn’t find any! All the colors were of the dark, muted variety. Nothing bright and fun and, erm, eye-popping. So I ended up using my own colors I came up with.

Another complaint, the color appearance differs so much between my laptop and my desktop computer. grrrs. They’re so much more light and pastel-y on my desktop, and dark and saturated on my laptop. :( Now I question how awful they look on others’ computer screens. Hopefully no one gets eyestrain trying to read my blog!

Okay, it was mostly the HTML code output that I edited, not really PHP or Javascript (basically code I don’t know), but still. I managed to not screw up my blog while working inside a file with PHP. :3

I also learned what “\n” or “backslash n” means. (New line.) hee. I’m learnin’!

Also, if you didn’t notice, I had a FlickrRSS plugin working in the sidebar before, but decided it’s not the way I want to go about inserting my photos.

Basically I want to upload a photo to Flickr and write a mini-blog entry in the description, then display both on my blog. But the sidebar is waaay too tiny for that (I think it’s too tiny for even the Twitter updates.)

Ideally I’d like the photo updates to show up with my blog entries, but I really don’t know how to go about doing that, so I guess I’ll just make regular WordPress entries linking to the Flickr image. How unspectacular. *snerk* That is, if I actually get around to doing photo updates. (I probably haven’t touched my camera for the past two weeks. How sad…poor camera.)