Tag Archives: Blogging

On Schedule Slip

May 6, 2015 Ashgar 2 Comments

It’s the first week of the Newbie Blogger Initiative, which means I’ve now been doing this for a year. I haven’t kept up nearly the schedule that Belghast does, or even my own personal goal of twice a week. It used to annoy me that people would post about missing posts in webcomics, but when you previously did something regularly, it kind of stays on your mind. Unless you plan out time every day to do something like this, Schedule Slip is probably going to happen. This remains true if you write your posts ahead of time, unless you are diligent enough to keep a buffer of more than one post.

Causes

For me, my posting got a lot more irregular when I moved, and lost the ability to write and publish things during lunch. Even before I started my new job (and I had actual free time), I didn’t realize how important it was to my posting to have a time period set aside every day to do it in. Other things I’ve written about already. I have 3 drafts that I could finish and publish half-written. There’s a lot of “not good enough” that I feel about these, but really, I shouldn’t have to.

Then there are the other reasons. Just this past week, Tam and I had technical issues. Travel happens, and personally, I’m not the biggest fan of writing a post on an iPad. Life gets in the way sometimes.

Solutions

For me the solution is going to be setting aside time on specific days to drop everything and write more. The blog posting is a nice supplement to Aggrochat, and appearing on the same website is an added bonus. Bel gets around it by posting every single morning. Tam does something similar, but on weeknights. I think that might work better for me, so I guess I’ll find out if I can have more output this month.

On Obstacles

August 2, 2014 Ashgar

It’s interesting to consider the things that keep me from posting a blog post every day. I try to maintain a twice a week posting rate, although I haven’t done a good job of keeping to any particular schedule. There have been several times when I wrote most of a post and it hasn’t gone up until the next day, even though I spent probably under an hour on the actual writing part. This is examining the things that cause delays, in order to help me (and perhaps others) better avoid them this month.

1. Not Enough Pretty Pictures

I try to include some imagery with almost everything I post, but I’m not in the practice of taking screenshots much. I used to take more when I was playing WoW, but I got out of the habit when I started tanking raids. The boss’s feet and legs usually don’t make for a good screenshot, and I had other things in mind anyway.

What usually happens here is that I start to write something, realize I have no relevant screenshots, and delay the post until I can take some. I’m getting better at taking screenshots as I play (this is really easy for Steam games) so hopefully this one won’t happen as much in the future.

2. Not Interesting Enough

I originally had some grand standard in mind for my posts, that they should inform and entertain all at once, and also be on whatever the current hot topic is. Unfortunately, this isn’t really compatible with how I think or how I play games, so the posting schedule suffered. Some cool things did come out of it though, like the post about Transistor.

This venture is to teach me that there’s a middle ground between writing War and Peace and writing about my breakfast. It’s okay to post about random adventures in the things I’m doing. That’s what the blog’s allegedly about anyway.

3. Too Personal

This one doesn’t come up as much, but it has stopped me a few times. I attempted to write the post that became about podcasting a few times, but stopped because it primarily discusses me. This is a bigger hurdle than the others, for me. What I said there is true, I’m a fairly reserved person.

There’s time to fix that, I suppose. I have 29 more of these to write after this, and I can’t imagine I’ll keep myself out of all of them.

Edit:
I forgot to mention this when it went up, but for more posts about… everything, check out the Blaugust Initiative.

On Blaugust

July 17, 2014 Ashgar

The major advantage to writing a blog post in the afternoon is that I can “borrow” topics from people who post in the morning. This has been convenient more than a few times, and today is one of those times. Belghast has been posting daily since April of last year, and today he challenged others to do the same for the month of August. And to that, I think I have only one thing to say:

Challenge Accepted

There are two main reasons I started blogging during this year’s NBI. The first was to have a bit of an outlet for my random thoughts, because I have a lot of random thoughts, mostly (but not entirely) relating to gaming. The second reason was simply to write more. I’ve been sticking to two posts a week, albeit rather erratically, and I think I could probably kick it up a few notches. I’m generally a rather reserved person, and this has helped me to express some things I otherwise might not have.
blaugust

With Reservations

As an additional note, Bel mentions posting a bit more personally, and I don’t think that’s going to happen this month. I’d like to keep this web space a bit more focused on my hobbies, rather than my personal life. But expect to see an expansion in the types of things I talk about, because staying focused on one thing for days at a time is just unlikely to happen for me. (Then again, my yearly obsession with FF5 does paint a different picture.) It’ll be an experiment for me. I don’t know how grand it will end up, but it should at least be entertaining. If you’re interested in doing the same, the community is here on Anook.