For all those who care to know about fellow bloggers: Juggling Frogs is reportedly fine and busy preparing for a family simcha (celebration). Nice to hear good news.
A few days ago I created a Tag Cloud for my sidebar. What’s a Tag Cloud, you ask? Go down to where it says Popular Tags. If you roll your mouse over one of the tags, you can see how many posts I have done that have that tag. And if you click on it, you can read those posts. Now, being an artist, I wanted the smaller tags to balance more nicely with the larger tags. So ideally I would want some little tag that begins with an ‘a’ or a ‘b’ to balance those larger ones. That’s just more interesting than starting my cooking for Shabbat.
Finally, I am pleased to say that Akismet, the anti-spam module that comes with WordPress, let Therapydoc post a comment without my having to take it out of spam, where it previously put her comment. So my fears of having to check continually to see if I have false positives in my Akismet comments were unfounded. This stuff works, after all. (Basically, I like WordPress).
Do you find yourself thinking about your next post? Or your next comment? Do you wonder how a blogger is doing, if the blogger hasn’t posted in a week or two?
For me, it all started last summer, when Noah Feldman wrote his notorious piece for the New York Times Magazine about how Maimonides School, my alma mater and his, had the audacity to crop him and his fiancée out of a photo. I found myself calling my friends in the Boston area to ask their reactions. No one seemed terribly interested. “Oh,” said one of my friends. “I remember when he came to visit Harvard, when he was still in high school.” What do you want to do, my friend had asked. The response was something about helping people. My friend at first interpreted this to mean he wanted to enter a career such as social work. Upon further discussion, she discovered what he really meant was he wanted to be President of the United States. Whatever.
Anyway, I found myself Googling “Noah Feldman” and “Maimonides School” in Google Search Blogs. Fast forward a month or two, I got hooked on my Google Reader and dozens of blogs. The other day, one of my son’s friends remarked on how many emails I had. “No, those are posts in my Google Reader, ” I explained. Though I do get an awful lot of emails, too, especially when during the week when I am working.
Commenting was the next step. Somehow, it was very difficult at first to leave a comment; I felt vulnerable, exposed. “You’ll regret what you wrote,” remarked one friend, who feels that way about what she says at times. But after a while I was more comfortable with the commenting process. I do tend to hesitate before commenting, and I edit and re-edit my comments, as though the whole world will read them and misunderstand them.
Finally, I set up my own blog. This was fun! As I am a web designer and developer, I have my own website already. I had read good things about WordPress, and I had an enjoyable time in December setting up the site.
Some people start blogs because they have something to say and a need to say it. I had a need to design a site, but…what to say? I still struggle with that question. As an artist, I try to intersperse text-based posts with photographs or artwork. And I like to add at least one image to a post, if time permits. My subconscious often leads me to my next post topic.
Thank you to the bloggers who have left comments on my site:
And a note of gratitude to any of my Highland Park buddies who have taken the time to read at least one of my posts, often after I prod them to read a particular post. And thanks to those who have commented ( especially my star commenter).
Seems to me the best way to learn all about blogs is to blog, right?
So Technorati wants me to post this to claim my blog:
Technorati Profile
Leave me comments, so I can learn more about how to handle those…
