Category Archives: blogging about blogging

blogging about blogging, music

Stepping in Dogshit

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I don’t know anyone who likes to step in dogshit. I don’t.

I stepped in dogshit in a post I have since deleted. It was a post about Drake and how I thought I didn’t like him but I also didn’t know any of his music.

What kind of dogshit post is that? I guess I could have kept it up. I think of blogs, or online journals, etc., as a carefully-curated stream of thought and opinion by the author. It’s a stream of thought that would rarely venture stepping into dogshit.

So I deleted my dumb post because it showed me just out of my depth, wondering why people liked something a lot that I was not familiar with while simultaneously making absolutely no effort to explore that thing before posting something on the Internet about it. Is Drake even something people care about that much at this point, anyways? After I posted I took a look at Spotify and listened to one of his higher-rated albums. It was from 2013, fer cryin’ out loud.

I don’t like making spelling errors, I don’t like looking like a stupid idiot, I don’t like showing parts of me that I don’t intend to show. I think I’m smart, but I’m not all that smart, either. I am also ignorant about a lot of stuff. Maybe this dumb detour will just make me think a little harder before I share something, or give me pause when I start talking out of my butt.

Here’s a pic I made for the first post. I still think it’s kind of funny. It’s a variation on Drakeposting – the guy in the bottom right is Nick Drake.

a peek into the exciting life of splotchy, blogging about blogging

Pulse

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I want to write again. I don’t know if I have the momentum.

I dearly love people I have met on Twitter, and that’s what occupies most of any “creative”-type time I spend online.

But all that stuff funnels straight down the garbage chute. I thought blogs were ephemeral, but Twitter is ephemeral on ephemeroids.

And, believe it or not, I *do* get tired of desperately trying to please people, something I inevitably fall into when tweeting. Okay, I don’t get tired so much as wearied by it. (P.S. LOVE ME. LOVE MEEEEEEEEEE!) I get my feelings hurt more than I care to admit. Hm. Okay, I just admitted it. Okay, so now, I get my feelings hurt as much as I care to admit. Exactly equivalent to that.

This blog has always been nice for me. And it’s still here, even though I rarely tend to it. It’s a robot pet that just needs its batteries swapped when I want to play.

Here, another metaphor. My blog is an island. It’s mine. You can comment on my island, but I can shoot your comment with a fucking gun. There, I just killed your fucking comment. How does it feel, comment-leaver? Oh, I wouldn’t do that. But I like having SPACE here, on the Interwebs. I even like having a little CONTROL.

On Twitter I’m just an account name and an avatar. My personality does percolate through, but I’m a dot bouncing around in something larger, anonymous and potentially unfriendly.

Hey, I *like* typing things that are longer than 140 characters. I like the idea of wasting page real estate.

Look!

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

boggedy boggedy boggedy boggedy boggedy boggedy!

That felt good. So good.

I like existing in space and time. I like leaving a trail. I like blogging.

There’s nothing expected of me here, I know. I could post this and never say another word. But that’s so sad. I want to have a pulse at this blog.

What am I gonna write about? I don’t know. Maybe I’ll make up a robot sister. Maybe I’ll write about my goddamned feelings. But I’d like to have a pulse, to not be confused with something dead.

beep-beep, beep-beep, beep-beep, beep-beep, etc.

blogging about blogging, twitter

This Blog Got 200,000 Hits About I-Don’t-Give-A-Shit-How-Long Ago

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So, this blog got 200,000 hits at some point.

It’s at around 201,000 now. I’d do a screenshot of my Sitecounter, but who really gives a goddamn?

I used to look at my stats a lot. Now, not so much.

These days I mostly get hits from people doing image searches, usually finding something on one of my Unconnected Tuesdays posts. Visits generally don’t last long. Oh, except for the Googlebot. Always with the fucking Googlebot.

I’m past fretting about hits, comparing the hits of one month to the previous month, etc., etc., ad nauseum.

No, I haven’t become serene and calm, free of attachments.

Now I wonder when the hell Rosanne Cash is going to realize how awesome I am and start following me on the Twitter.

Priorities…

blogging about blogging

30 Days Of Blogging

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Fellow blogger Chris is doing rundown of all the people on his blogroll. It was inspired in part by the decline Chris saw in posting/participation/etc. in the blogosphere (for example, I am probably the first person in six months who has typed the word “blogosphere”.)

Chris says a side benefit of his blogroll retrospective is that it might draw some bloggers out of seclusion. Well, I have been weakly blogging for a looong time, but I am using Chris’ listing of my blog as a motivator to get me to blog *something* for each of the next 30 days.

Thanks, Chris, for the kick in the pants.

blogging about blogging

Minutemen Song Titles That Would Also Function Quite Nicely As Blog Post Titles

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01. Shit From an Old Notebook
02. Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Truth?
03. Dreams are Free, Motherfucker!
04. Bob Dylan Wrote Propaganda Songs
05. I Felt Like A Gringo
06. Political Song For Michael Jackson To Sing
07. Maybe Partying Will Help
08. Shit You Hear at Parties
09. The Big Blast for Youth
10. Life As a Rehearsal
11. This Ain’t No Picnic
12. Joe McCarthy’s Ghost
13. History Lesson
14. God Bows To Math
15. There Ain’t Shit on T.V. Tonight
16. The World According to Nouns
17. Storm in My House
18. Jesus and Tequila
19. Anxious Mo-Fo
20. It’s Expected I’m Gone

blogging about blogging

Mispelled

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I hate misspelling words. Hate it.

I am pretty good at spelling.

Sometimes I make mistakes. It seems that my mistakes typically occur with words that have double letters. I’ll use a single letter when double letters are required.

I got eliminated from a 5th grade spelling bee because I fucked up the word “paralel” [parallel].

Firefox has a nice spell-check feature that shows up for you when typing in text areas. A text area is a free-form box that you can type shit in.

If you use Blogger, you use text areas all the time — it’s the space where you type the body of your blog post.

So, like I said, I am good at spelling, but if I do make a mistake when typing in a text area, a red underline appears with the word Firefox thinks I messed up.

There is another kind of HTML widget called a text box, which you cannot type freeform text in. It’s a simple little box where you can input a limited amount of information. The place where you type the title of your blog post uses a text box.

Firefox does not do any kind of spell check for text boxes, which I guess makes sense, seeing as you’re not typing as much as in a text area. Unfortunately, when you make a spelling error, you are not alerted to it.

So, since I didn’t have Firefox reminding me, “Hey lunkhead, you spelled this wrong!”, I misspelled “Millennium” as “Millenium” in this post title.

You may notice that Millennium is spelled properly in the title now. I fixed it.

However, as you may or may not know, the direct link URL that is created for one’s blog post actually uses text from the blog title. The URL does not get updated when one updates the title of the post.

So, unless I delete it (I’m not), this misspelling will follow me around for fucking forever.

http://isplotchy.com/blog/2009/06/setlist-to-june-29th-millenium-park.html

Yes, I am insane.

blogging about blogging, meme

FAIL Meme FAIL

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I think I saw the first FAIL pictures very soon after they started popping up on the web (a year ago? a year and a half?).

I thought the first ones I saw were sort of funny, but then these kinds of pictures started appearing everywhere.

Next, a few sites sprung up, devoted to all things FAIL.

I really started disliking the whole business, because:

1) Most of the time, it wasn’t funny.
2) It was often mean-spirited.
3) I’m tired of people lazily shitting on other people/things for a cheap laugh.
4) I’m tired of people lazily shitting on other people/things in general.

It’s okay to make light of others on occasion, etc. (hey, it must be okay if *I* do it!), but for something to have sneering at anything and everything else as its sole purpose — well, it’s just too much for me to take.

For this, FAIL meme, you fail.

blogger, blogging about blogging, computers, geek

A Change To How Blogger Parses Comments

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You may or may not know this, but you can do limited HTML markup in comments on blogs that run on the Blogger software (*.blogspot.com websites).

I will occasionally use tags (you can use lower-case or upper-case i’s, it doesn’t matter) to italicize text in a comment. I like to do this to another person’s text that I am responding to, so it’s clear the text wasn’t written by me.

Example:
What I type:
Hey, how’s it going, Splotchy?

Fine, thanks for asking!

The text above gets displayed in the comment as:
Hey, how’s it going, Splotchy?

Fine, thanks for asking!

Well, I noticed when I tried to italicize some text in a comment earlier this week that things are a little different. When I previewed the comment it looked fine, but when I actually published the thing there were no line breaks.

Instead, the comment appeared like this:
Hey, how’s it going, Splotchy?Fine, thanks for asking!

Icky, eh?

Previously, Blogger was converting my line breaks into HTML line breaks, which are represented by the
tag. Now, it appears that they have modified their software. If Blogger now sees an HTML tag included in a comment, it no longer converts line breaks to the
tags recognized by browsers.

A little sidenote for those who want to know. A line break in an HTML source file does not equal a line break in a browser. Blogger does the heavy lifting of converting the line breaks that you make in your blog posts to HTML line breaks (
— case doesn’t matter here — it could just as well be
).

So, you have the option of giving up your use of italics in comments, or you can be a little amateur HTML coder and add a
to force a line break yourself.

Here’s an example how to do it:
What I type:
Hey, how’s it going, Splotchy?



Fine, thanks for asking!

Which will display in a comment as:
Hey, how’s it going, Splotchy?

Fine, thanks for asking!

Anyways, I’m a geek. Happy commenting! Feel free to give this a try on this post, you nice people, you.

Try it with and without the
tags if’n you don’t believe me.

blogging about blogging

Types of Online Word Emphasis

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  • *Surrounding asterisks* – my chosen means of accenting a word in a post
  • ALL-CAPS – I use this occasionally, more often in humorous posts.
  • Bold – I don’t like bold — it doesn’t stand out as much as I would like.
  • Italics – Don’t use this much, either. I remember noting the nice of use of italics for emphasis in The Catcher in the Rye, but I reserve italics on my blog for titles of albums and books (hey, did you notice I italicized a book title in this very sentence??!).
  • Underline – Looks too much like a * hyperlink .
  • Blinking – I don’t want you to kill me.

* Sorry, that wasn’t a link. This one is really, I promise!

*LOVE, SPLOTCHY*