It’s only taken me four years to do it, but this is finally the 1000th post on this blog. Admittedly, my first two years of blogging were sporadic at best. There was something about the Xanga community that just never really inspired me to write much. I think it mostly had to do with the fact that it was so exclusive – you had to be registered there in order to interact – and most of my intended target audience were outside the Xanga community. Xanga also never really let me customize my site anywhere near as much as I wanted to. You were pretty much stuck with their chosen layout – and I’m pretty sure it’s still that way.
So, stumbling across WordPress was literally the best thing that ever happened to my writing. It took me a few weeks of playing with my new hosted blog to really get a feel for how things worked, and then it took me awhile to develop a readership of any kind (a readership which, I’m sad to say, I haven’t been able to put as much time an effort into fostering as I’d like lately). But since writing on WordPress, I’ve been much more focused on my blogging and becoming a part of an active, growing community that has been very satisfying and enjoyable.
I’m thrilled to be a WordPress blogger, and I’m looking forward to getting more actively and intimately involved with both the WordPress community and the WordPress code. I’m certain the next 1000 posts will be as enjoyable, if not more so, than the first 1000.
Tags: blogging, blogs, WordPress, Writing, xanga
I’ve complained about Xanga in the past about a variety of pet peeves with that blogging community, things both pertaining to many of the members of that community and about the way the blogging platform itself is built. Well, in light of my previous entry, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Xanga is now a much more open community, i.e. they now allow ‘anonymous’ comments. What this means is that you no longer have to be a member of the Xanga community in order to leave your comments and feedback on any given blog. I don’t know how long this feature has been on Xanga, but I’m very pleased to see that the Xanga developers have finally gotten with the program. It’s been a big frustration of mine for quite some time that Xanga was so exclusive about this sort of thing, especially since I have a number of friends who still blog there (despite my earnest urgings to move over to wordpress.com).
So, kudos to Xanga. I, for one, am very pleased that this change has been made.
Tags: blogging, blogs, comments, xanga
Back to the business of writing, now that the holiday festivities are behind us.
You may notice by glancing at the sidebar that there is a growing backlog of entries in the archives. I have been working on bringing all my writings from Xanga over into WordPress with the intent of likely closing my Xanga blog down for good. Since I am dating these entries to their original dates, they will not show up in either my RSS feed or the email subscription, so if you feel inclined to read some of my earlier writing, you can browse the archives and do so. Over the next couple of weeks, I hope to bring most of that material over here. It’ll also give me a good excuse to weed out some of the stuff that I don’t really want to keep.
I’ll also be updating to WordPress 2.0 sometime soon, now that most of the bugs seem to be worked out of the system. If I get time I may even do it tonight, since it sounds like it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.
Tags: Writing, xanga
In the interests of trying to really get started with syndicating my writing, I will be mirroring everything from my Xanga site here for a while, and vice versa. Once I have a pretty strong readership, I will probably fold my Xanga site and write here exclusively. The goal is to allow myself even more flexibility to write about what I want and to disseminate my writing via RSS feeds and email newsletters (which I will hopefully be adding soon). Please bear with me as I build this site up little by little. I’m very excited about this, and I hope you will join me in my excitement.
Tags: mirror, plugins, WordPress, xanga
A couple of things that I find slightly annoying about different Xanga sites:
– People who refuse to embed their links under text (like so), so what you end up having to do in order to read the post/comments is to side-scroll back and forth. Seriously, people, just embed them! It makes it easier on everyone!
– Music embedded on Xanga sites, especially since Xanga does not allow any way to turn those obnoxious tunes off. It’s frustrating to try to go directly to a particular site, only have to your computer bog down while it tries to load the site. Plus, if you’re using Media Player (or other such software) to listen to music while you surf, suddenly you end up with this jarring contrast of music and you end up having to turn the music off that you WANT to listen to while you are
subjected to music that you DON’T want to listen to. Yeah, this one irks me a little.
Sorry. Had to get that off my chest. A post of more substance coming later. Promise. (Not that it matters a whole lot.
Tags: Design, whinging, xanga
