WYSIWYG Blog Editors

So I set up my website with WordPress again.  I'm still haven't found a theme I really love, but the one I've got is working well enough for now.  I thought about it briefly - moving my whole blog over there - but after playing around with it again, I've come to the conclusion that I like Blogger, and Google's whole interconnected suite of tools, better.

Why?

1. The editor.  Blogger's WYSIWYG editor doesn't have a ton more options, but fonts are an easy dropdown, underline is a button on the toolbar, and picture insertion is much easier.
2. Pictures also upload to my PicasaWeb account, where all my other pictures are, rather than to some nebulous place in the WordPress directory.
3. And I can upload and insert multiple pictures at a time.  Editing picture options is much easier, as well.  The pictures also automatically link to open themselves full-size when you click on them.
4. Single-spacing.  I can't seem to single-space in my WordPress theme, and damn it, I don't want to have to go in and customize all the CSS.  I went to WordPress so I wouldn't have to manually rebuild all the pages from the code up.

What I mainly wanted from the WordPress install was pages.  I haven't set up my own templates yet (believe me, I want to), nor have I found a theme that advertises itself as having the templates I want for pages, but it's working for now.  If only I could get WordPress with Blogger's editor...

Widget!! -->

The NaNoWriMo widgets are back!  So there's me.  I need to update my word count.

I think I'm into Chapter 9 now.  Writing in chapters isn't entirely familiar for me, but I figured if I did an outline, maybe I would keep it moving better.

Most recently introduced character:  nine-foot-tall intelligent blond sloth.  Ahem.  (Sloths are adorable.  It was my favorite animal in the zoo when I was a kid.)

Imported Goods

I pulled all the posts from the Learn with CDLC workshop/class I took; I think it pulled everything over okay, although it looks like I'm going to have to go back in and manually re-add the jump breaks.  (The other blog is still there.)  I added the CDLC Things tag to all of them.

One more Thing (5)!

One of the things I wanted to get out of doing this series of Things was to be motivated to write on my other blog more often - so far that seems to be working!  I'm aiming for about once a week, and doing the Things and thinking about blogging and Twitter and such has been prompting me to write about other interests.

Thing 5

Take the weekend off?  Nope, I drew the Easter slot in the reference librarian rotation this year.  We were surprisingly busy, with actual research-related questions and not just, "Do you have a pen I can borrow?"

Feedback first so it's easy to find:

1. The "in plain English" videos are great!
2. It feels like there should be a more cohesive place for discussion for a program like this than in comments on blogs, but then I wonder if that wouldn't just end up being another "Thing" for people to learn.  (A forum, or a chat room, or some other group communication tool.)  Blogs can work for group communication, but it can be more cumbersome than some other media if not everyone is posting on the same one's comments.

And a summary of what I've learned (and/or observations) thus far:

Continued blog observations (and another .opml)

I read a handful of heavily commented blogs regularly, and I also moderate an online forum, so I've been noticing how the different blog platforms handle comment threading.

Comment systems that allow replies to replies, threading the conversation, really help to foster discussion, since it's easy to tell who is talking to whom. With out the reply-to-comment, it can be more difficult to unravel the threads of the conversation. Thus far Blogger doesn't seem to do comment threading; WordPress does.

Seeing how different people name, design, and use their blogs for a shared purpose is fascinating! Which tools people choose, how they use them, and how they envision the relationships between themselves, their blogs, and the central purpose (the workshop) are all very interesting to me.

A large number of us are using Blogger, but WordPress is a significant minority (compared to a paltry number of Posterous and Edublogs users). A large number of us are using post on the left/menus on the right layouts, with a handful putting the menu-type items (archives, 'about me' sections, etc.) on the left or trying out the three-column options. I wonder if there's a correlation with something (like right-handed/left-handed), or if it's just because that's the layout most of the default templates suggest first.

Given how interesting all those things are to me, you'd think I would be better at filling out conference evaluations. *sigh*

And last but certainly not least: the .opml file for all the blogs added to the spreadsheet since I last looked at it. If I've missed any, please let me know! This is just the new ones, so you shouldn't have to worry about it accidentally importing duplicate feeds.

Blog layouts

Since I started the Learn with CDLC... workshop? class? Anywho, since I started it, I've been playing with Blogger's blog layout, and I like the one I made for my blog for the class better... so I'm stealing it for here. Mostly I'm just on a Fisherman's Island kick - the drive back across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel was just that awesome.

Tweaking

I like to rearrange furniture. That's not really feasible in my office (limited outlets), so I tend to rearrange websites (blogs, forums, etc.) I administrate when I get to feeling like something needs to be moved around.

I didn't do a ton of set-up on this blog yesterday - picked a template that I could live with, and such - so I started fiddling around with the gadgets today. One of the things I decided to add and keep (so far) is the RSS feed for the other blog I write under this log-in. (Three posts in the past six weeks... hopefully I can get it moving more.)

One of the things I went through setting up but didn't keep was a list of links to all the other currently registered blogs for this program. It was great to set up because it meant I went and read what everyone else has written so far, but it occurred to me that, if all 150 participants register, it will be way too long and scrolly.

Past experience says scrolly is bad; people don't like to have to scroll all the way down to the bottom to get to something, the same way that above the fold/below the fold matters in print newspapers. I find the scrolly problem to be true for a lot of news sites that I read; they tend to put the newest stories at the top for that reason. If I have to scroll too far from the top of the page, I don't really bother to go all the way down to see what's there.

Of course, this conflicts pretty directly with my tendencies towards verbosity. I've found that 3-to-5-page-paper is a length pretty well ingrained in me from all those assignments in high school and my undergrad. Three to five pages doesn't really sound long (double-spaced, right?) until you realize your medium isn't 8 1/2" by 11" paper, but a probably 5" column down a screen. Scrolly.

The Blogs in Plain English video has me thinking about my high school journalism class: the funnel shape for stories, putting the most important information towards the beginning, and the later paragraphs are all details the loss of which won't make the story unintelligible if they have to be cropped for space. I was never good at that, probably because I've also never been good at drafting; most of my writing is my train of thought in action, and I never learned to think in a journalistic style. Given the whole problem of scrolly, the journalism concepts are probably good to keep in mind: how many people actually read to the end of a long post?

Perhaps this is why, in my high school journalism class, I was the copy editor. I proofread, cropped, and assembled, but I didn't write a lot of content. We didn't have journalism software in my class: the school paper was all assembled on large sheets with a wax gun. If there was something last-minute to go in, I had to pull apart the sheets, rearrange, and make it fit, occasionally slicing off a paragraph here or there to make it work. I like to tweak, to rearrange, and although the list of links was pulled because it would be scrolly, I'm sure I'll find another gadget to fiddle with here before the course of Things is done.

Blog Consolidation, day 2

Ok, I think I have most stuff sorted out where I want it. I'm still not 100% sure I'll keep the WoW posts from the WordPress blog here, but they don't really fit the scope of my hunter blog, either.

In other news, I re-read Thief of Time (Terry Pratchett). You can't go wrong with Pratchett.

Imported goods

So, I imported my WordPress blog. (It was called, "Kate says, 'Moo.'" Yes, moo. It's a long story that goes back to high school, and it somehow has become my standard greeting in online games. In a collision of idiosyncrasies, my husband was also mooing independently of me before I met him. He, however, is fascinated by cows. I was simply finding a new substitute for "maybe," which was starting to irritate my mother. A Beanie Baby koala from a Happy Meal was also involved.). It wasn't a straightforward thing; I had to poke around to find a site to convert the export to something Blogger could use.

The scope of my WordPress blog was broader - it had a bunch of gaming stuff that I'm not sure will end up here in the future. (I'm trying to keep all my WoW content on a WoW-specific blog, but... maybe I'll stop trying to segregate stuff so much. I haven't decided. The hunter mechanics will stay on the Marksman blog, though. Because the math of shot rotations and whatnot is only interesting to the... million or so of us who play hunters...)

Anywho, there's a backlist now, such as it is. I had to go through and delete all the spammer comments again for some reason. And I still need to clean up the tags.

Pacific Standard Time

Ah-ha! I could have sworn I set myself to EST when I set this blog up, but apparently not.

No, I haven't been posting at ungodly early hours. The only thing I do on PST is World of Warcraft.

Probably indicative

I suppose it's sad that, as I'm setting this blog up, when I look at the preview of the blog and see the title ("K."), the first thing that I associate with it is not my initial, but "Law." Damn you, Library of Congress Classification.

On Blogs

Blogs are becoming a bad habit for me. I think I'm still looking for a posting method which works out for me.

I started on kebrent.com on the front page when I initially redesigned the site in... 2004ish? (Ok, I lie... the site I started on is older, but not really for public consumption.) That was supposed to be about my writing, and by and large has stayed such. I added a WordPress blog to it, but keeping WordPress updated is just as much of a pain as the phpBB boards were.

So I moved to Blogger, slowly, sometime last fall, but only for World of Warcraft-related stuff. I'm sure most of the people searching for me under my real name aren't interested in the mechanics of a character class in an MMORPG. If you are, for some reason, looking for me in that context, you should be searching for my character's name.

I did try out LiveJournal at some point, but I didn't really care for it. I haven't gotten into twitter as much as I'd like to because I have limited text messaging, and I don't want to use them up. I also don't think my daily activities are interesting to the rest of the world. (Which is why Facebook's status updates feel more relevant - the people I have friended are the ones who care about a pie plate shattering in my oven.)

I worry mostly about not having archives outside the blog's servers, but I suppose I could allay that by writing things out in Notepad first and then posting them. That's the librarian in me - worrying about access and born-digital information.

So anyway, I've been feeling my way around in the methods of online public exposition, and I think I'm going to try this as a replacement for the WordPress blog.

Oh, look, a blog...

Ok, so I added a blog to this site, too.  I feel kind of guilty about this site's lack of updates - it was a birthday present, and then after a while I realized that throwing everything out in the open on the web probably wasn't a good idea (damn you, Google!), so I got my public site (kebrent.com), and this one got no-roboted.  For the most part it doesn't pop up in Google, so hopefully I can post all the miscellaneous opinionated stuff I think about without it showing up front and center and tied to me, in case of random Googling potential employer biases.  Not that it seems like I really need to worry about it - the vast majority of the hits on my name are for some woman who died in the 1600s (damn you, Ancestry.com). :P

Anyway, I've been good about using the other blog for stuff that I don't care if anyone sees (tech exploration, WoW stuff, books, etc.), so hopefully I'll be able to use this one similarly, but for more controversial topics.  You know, like my waffling about candidates for the Democratic nomination.  Stuff like that.

Moo!

I figured I should test out some blogging software once.  If I'm bad, I might use it at work sometimes, since that's usually where I see news articles I want to share with people...