May 27, 2010
Not dead
Is my blog dead - certainly looks like it I know, but it's not.
I'm trying to think what to do, but I will be doing something...
Some book reviews imminent.
Posted by se71 at 09:53 PM | Comments (0)
March 15, 2006
Critical Mass
Sometimes, someone opens your eyes to a new way of thinking about things. This article for example, is not about blogging or writing primarily, but there is a remark that I've very much taken to heart over the last week:
"...the great thing about having a website is that no matter how slowly you add items, all the old stuff is still there. No matter how slowly you build it, as long as it's getting built it's okay"
I really love writing book/film/TV show/music reviews. I started doing it for fun really, and also, for my future self. There are movies I cannot even remember watching, which is a great shame. If I write a quick review then I can check back to see what I thought of something the first time around, and maybe avoid wasting a couple of hours.
I'd like other people to read them too, and hopefully find them helpful. But my website is small, so how are people going to find them. The site is however slowly growing towards what I hope will be a critical mass of reviews and articles. Already I can see some hits coming through from the search engines.
The great thing about the above quote is that I'm now feeling more encouraged to add new ones every day, working towards the time when this might actually become a useful resource as well as just a personal site. Even though the progress seems slow, I'll get there eventually if I just keep at it. And whan this happens, I'll do a bit of a redesign I think to make it easier to browse around.
There are already nearly 100 reviews, and over 200 posts on this blog, the time might be soon.
Posted by se71 at 11:16 AM | Comments (1)
February 15, 2006
Blog Self Promotion
I'm in the process of trying to promote my blog a bit more around the internet. Some of my friends read the things I write, but why should they be the only ones to suffer!
I'm already a member of Technorati and registered my other more specialised blogs there too. But this was done ages ago and doesn't appear to be helping much.
I guess I need to get listed on more directories, and become a hit with google, so I've just setup a page on wikablog, here as a start.
A wiki is interesting, it's a website where anyone can edit the pages, or even create brand new pages. It's quite easy once you understand it, but is not for the fainthearted. This might be a barrier to the site becoming really well populated.
You might have heard of Wikipedia, the online free encyclopedia. This is a wiki, with millions of pages I expect, but apart from this wikis really haven't made it very far into the general web consciousness.
Everyone you sign up with obviously wants you to put a link back to their site. I hope to try and avoid filling my blog realestate with too many adverts though, as this page from Tim Worstall (where I found the Wikablog site, so thanks for that) is looking a bit on the busy side.
As I think of more ways to publicise myself, I'll try and add them in here.
Posted by se71 at 01:26 PM | Comments (0)
February 01, 2006
Google Adsense
I've set up Google's Adsense on this site, and my other blogs too. In case you don't know what that means, it's a way of placing advertisements on my website to generate income for me. Everytime someone clicks on an advert, I think I get a small amount of money.
Currently there is a small ad in the top banner, but that's just because I don't know how to change my site's HTML and CSS well enough to put it down the side yet. Watch that space.
It's great fun watching the ads that Google generates for me. Google look at my page content, and try to match the adverts to the subject matter. I'm even tempted to try and write things here to deliberately try and force particular types of ads :-)
Another interesting feature about having adverts that you haven't chosen yourself on your website, is the possibility that something dodgy will show up. Maybe I'll write about politics, and a link to join the BNP will appear. Friend and fellow blogger Dave Cross pointed out to me that I can remove these from my list - but that makes the assumption that I actually see them.
Anyway, I've started planning my retirement, now that the money has started to roll in - I'm half way to my first dollar already !
Posted by se71 at 10:24 AM | Comments (0)
Google Adsense
I've set up Google's Adsense on this site, and my other blogs too. In case you don't know what that means, it's a way of placing advertisements on my website to generate income for me. Everytime someone clicks on an advert, I think I get a small amount of money.
Currently there is a small ad in the top banner, but that's just because I don't know how to change my site's HTML and CSS well enough to put it down the side yet. Watch that space.
It's great fun watching the ads that Google generates for me. Google look at my page content, and try to match the adverts to the subject matter. I'm even tempted to try and write things here to deliberately try and force particular types of ads :-)
Another interesting feature about having adverts that you haven't chosen yourself on your website, is the possibility that something dodgy will show up. Maybe I'll write about politics, and a link to join the BNP will appear. Friend and fellow blogger Dave Cross pointed out to me that I can remove these from my list - but that makes the assumption that I actually see them.
Anyway, I've started planning my retirement, now that the money has started to roll in - I'm half way to my first dollar already !
Posted by se71 at 10:24 AM | Comments (0)
December 17, 2005
Ideas for blog posts
Very few people read this blog, but I would like to entertain them occasionally.
In this post - which I'll update occasionally and so should make it back to the top of your RSS reader (you are using RSS aren't you?).
I'm going to list things that I'd like to write about, but don't get time. If someone updates this post with a comment, then I'll make every effort to actually write the post.
Ideas so far...
1. Write about old pop stars who get a new lease of life due to a more trendy artist liking them. Think Peter Kaye and Tony Christie here.
err, that's it, but stay tuned.
Posted by se71 at 06:01 PM | Comments (1)
October 20, 2005
Mushroom Photo
I took this photo of a big mushroom at the weekend, and have put it as my desktop picture - I like it a lot and think more people should have the opportunity to see it (all 3 of my regular readers :)
Also, blogging photos suddenly seems like a cool idea, so I'm going to do a bit more of it.
Posted by se71 at 12:51 PM | Comments (0)
April 22, 2005
Inspiration
Paul Graham writes essays - here's one he's done about writing that says some quite interesting and inciteful things. One I've picked out is:
"expect 80% of the ideas in an essay to happen after you start writing it"
I've been writing this blog for a while now, and usually I start with an idea, and just get typing. Even when I think it's going to be really short, somehow the flowing prose just streams out :-) Sometimes I reach conclusions I'd not really expected. Sometimes I write far too much and have to cut some off. But writing too much is better than too little, Paul's other comment about cutting out lots of things you write is also correct - I need to do more of that.
There is a huge amount of information like this on the interweb to help aspiring writers to write. Orson Scott Card, one of my favourite Science Fiction authors, teaches classes on writing and has some great help on his website Hatrack
Stephen King has written a book about it "On Writing", and also has these 10 Handy Tips.
Everyone seems to think that there are rules to follow. Perhaps there are a few; I'm not experienced or successful so it's not my place to say whether these are right or wrong. I do have one very obvious thing to say though. No one ever became a successful writer without actually making the effort and sitting down and churning the stuff out.
So if I haven't already mentioned it, that's why I'm here. I'm following the first and most important rule of writing. I'm actually doing it. Thanks to Paul Graham, one little iota of inspiration has led to a whole blog post.
Posted by se71 at 09:11 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 31, 2005
Technorati
I've joined a thing called Technorati. I'm not even exactly sure what it is, it just seemed like a good idea at the time.
It's a way of syndicating my blog so more people read it, without actually ramming it down friend's throats, which is what I'm having to do at the moment.
I have a ranking of 1,103,726 at the moment :-)
Posted by se71 at 10:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 11, 2005
More Blogs
I'm getting addicted to blogs - not blogging, but setting up new blogs.
I've just set up two more.
and
It's a bit like programming languages, once you know a few, you start to appreciate the subtle differences between them. Hopefully I'll learn enough to actually make sense of which one is 'best'.
Oops, forgot to mention this one too on Bloglines
Posted by se71 at 05:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Typekey
I got my first comment spam this morning. This means someone put a comment into my blog which was just a spam advertisement. This is not good.
Movable Type is the blogging software I'm using for this site. The people who make it have an initiative called Typekey which allows a degree of authentication for people who want to comment. I set myself up on there and registered this site, so now it's available here.
I'm not requiring people to use it, but if the comment spam gets too bad, I may have to do something. So if you head over to Typekey and set yourself up an account, that would be nice.
I had a bit of trouble actually getting my site set up to accept typekey.
This page gave me the help I needed.
You have to enter in your Typekey profile the root address of your blog, which is http://se71.org, rather than the proper path http://se71.org/blog. That's odd I think, and a bit counter intuitive, but now it's working.
Posted by se71 at 09:09 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 24, 2005
Work & Home
I'm not really allowed to blog about work. The NDA's in place hardly even allow me to talk about anything I'm doing. Which is a shame, as it's all suddenly got very interesting and not a little challenging.
I don't really like blogging about friends and family either, as it's their lives, and they should have the first say on what gets written about them.
So, it's just about my personal stuff then :-/
Posted by se71 at 04:03 PM | Comments (0)
February 21, 2005
Blogging
I was reading Kuro5hin at the weekend, and one of the posts seemed pertinent to me.
Basically, if you are writing a blog, and want people to read it, you should update it every day.
I concur completely, and so that's my aim from now on.
Posted by se71 at 02:28 PM | Comments (0)
February 08, 2005
Blog Content
I was chatting with a friend about starting a weblog. I explained that I had a lot of thoughts and ideas during the day, and most of them vanished. I wanted a way to capture them so that they wouldn't get lost, and perhaps I could get some interest from friends and family to discuss them if they merited it.
Only problem was, the examples I came up with were mostly me griping in a Grumpy Old Man(TM) way about Life, The Universe And Everything (TM).
I don't want this site to be just a list of reasons why modern life is rubbish, and me claiming it was much better when I was a lad, and it was all fields.
Some of the entries will be me on my soapbox - it's inevitable that things that annoy me most will stay in my head longer than usual and will make it as far as the keyboard. It's not my aim to continually complain though, so please pull me up on it if it gets too much.
Posted by se71 at 09:38 AM | Comments (1)
Blogging
I've created a new blog, lets see how long it lasts.
I already have about four or five other blogs on the go, but this is a bit different. One reason for the difference is that it's not on Blogger, it's on my own server, so I'm totally in control. Another is that it's using Movable Type, so a lot of the features that I wanted to build in my handmade site should be available, and I can actually make this public and start spouting on about things ad nauseum.
Posted by se71 at 09:21 AM | Comments (0)