Category: Wordpress

the wordpress experiment: three months on

whbeebe1 Comment

I decided to stop and take stock of the followers who are listed on the side of my blog. I find it thrilling to get messages from WordPress that yet another individual has decided to follow my blog. I didn’t start out looking for followers. But here’s an interesting statistic. Of the 35 officially listed, I found only 23 worth having follow me. In other words, roughly a third, for one reason or another, isn’t the kind of person I want following me. To show who I find I want to follow me, I checked all 35 links and then put them in the following table. If you’re not in that table, then you’re the kind of follower I wish I didn’t have.

Karen GreenKaren’s bloghttp://karengreenimaging.wordpress.com
rdmilliganR D Milligan ~ Each word is malleablehttp://rdmilligan.wordpress.com
randyWine Biz Radiohttp://winebizradio.com/
rmd6502http://robsadamsapple.wordpress.com/
Kendall F. Person, thepublicbloggerhttp://thepublicblogger.com/
jnolan2014http://jnolan2014.wordpress.com
mwanda1991http://mwanda319.wordpress.com
ajdevelopershttp://wavstudio.wordpress.com
MicMic’s Linux Experiencehttp://hreikin.wordpress.com/
webrpiRaspberry Pi Web Developmenthttp://webrpi.wordpress.com/
DLiberty’s Quillhttp://libertysquill.wordpress.com/
Raluca StoicaA Stairway to Fashionhttp://astairwaytofashion.com/
Spiritbathhttp://spiritbath.com/
2me4arthttp://2me4art.wordpress.com
Thomas CochranCovered in Beerhttp://coveredinbeer.com/
LenaLive simply, travel lightly, love passionately & don’t forget to breathehttp://mselenalevontraveling.com/
andysalwaysrightWithout wax / Andy Ritchie bloghttp://withoutwaxblogdotcom.com/
Opinionated ManA Good Blog is Hard to Findhttp://shatteredsmoke.com/
RachelKGlobe Driftinghttp://globedrifting.wordpress.com/
Chris MartinChris Martin Writeshttp://chrismartinwrites.com/
williamthebutlerWilliam the butlerhttp://williamthebutler.wordpress.com/
Just A Simple GuyOutlook in Lifehttp://myoutlookinlife.wordpress.com/
Ron GreeneRon Greene’s Bloghttp://rongreene.wordpress.com/

There’s a few reasons why I didn’t put you in the table;

  1. You’re blatantly selling something that I don’t want, such as SEO tips and tricks or something in the same category of get-rich-quick schemes. A number of these showed up recently and were the reason I decided to go through and look at all the followers of this blog.
  2. Three of the followers are gone or else the links don’t work.
  3. One of you has two blogs (Opinionated Man), so your second link wasn’t added.

The Facebook experiment has failed. Let’s go back.

It was this article that motivated to go through and “curate” my followers. The whole article is about how Facebook has utterly failed in particular, and social networking in general. One paragraph that truly resonated with me was this one:

We need to go back to smaller communities. Where people aren’t lost in the mediocre averages of large networks. That’s where ideas flourish.

This is not to say that I’m about to leave WordPress. I’ve met some very interesting people through WordPress, and frankly, I like my quiet backwater of a blog. And I still like WordPress much better than Blogger. The one true annoyance that drove me from Blogger was too much spam. WordPress’ comment spam filters are, ironically, as good as Google’s email spam filters. Which to me just goes to prove that Google is allowing Blogger to die by slow degrees while it pours all its considerable resources into Google Plus. Google Plus looks like crap, barely above Facebook.

This post marks my fifty-something post. It’s been an enjoyable experience so far, and I don’t think that’ll change any time soon.

and so it begins anew

whbeebe8 Comments

After considerable procrastination I finally decided to move from my old haunt (blogbeebe on Blogger) to something a little more “upscale”, such as WordPress. I’ve been meaning to do this for a very long time, but a very large anchor of posts has kept me from moving over. As of today I’ve been on Blogger for nearly ten years, and I have over 1,500 posts on the old blog.

The biggest reason for moving on from Blogger is that Google, the owner of Blogger, is ignoring it. It has barely changed over the years, and what has changed has been rather minor and towards integration into Google+.

Unlike Google+, Blogger is showing increasing signs of benign neglect. And considering the history of Google’s propensity to buy and then abandon properties (the latest being RSS Reader) that don’t fit into Google’s walled garden, I figured I’d better get while the gittin’ was good.

And so I wound up on WordPress.

I did ask some folks on the web about their experience with WordPress (such as atmtx, an Austin, Texas-based urban photographer) and everywhere I asked, the responses were very positive. That backed up my experiences with reading their WordPress powered blogs.

Right now I’ve signed up for the simplest free WordPress blog until I get some experience with posting to a WordPress powered blog. When I get my “blog legs” under me, then I’ll think about adding (and paying) for more features. But for the time being, simple is good.

I also hope that the move to WordPress will spark something of a creative renaissance. My posting on the old Blogger site has fallen quite a bit over the past year. I doubt I’ll reach the frenetic pace of a post/day that I was following in 2011, but I do want to get back to a steady productive pace, and one that has a reasonably high quality level. I want to write because I want to, not because I feel obligated.

For all of my readers, both old and new, welcome. And thanks for stopping by.