Saturday, March 31, 2012

On Blogging, the process and how I do it…

I started blogging three years ago, as an experiment for work... now, three years later, I increasingly find blogging enjoyable… particularly when traveling.

I blog about where I am going or what we are doing… where I or we (aka the wife and I, or the daughter and I, or where the daughter, the wife, and I have been, occasionally add the son, or substitute a friend… its all good…)

I carry my laptop when traveling… and increasingly an IPad… a gift from a friend… A gift I didn’t expect, and would have said I didn’t want, but am increasingly addicted to… I am trying to travel with just the I pad, but so far it doesn’t work… so I carry the IPad all the time, in my back pack… write the blog, then email it to myself, then pick it up on the laptop, edit it (those of you who read it now I don’t edit enough… but yes, I do edit at least a little… you don’t want to see it before I edit…) Sometimes I let my wife or daughter read it before I post it… (those posts can be identified by their lack of spelling or editing errors… )

Increasingly I make notes, that become the blog post during the day… sometimes just a notable quote or a location or a note of something done… sometimes when inspired by the place, sentences, even paragraphs… almost but not quite literature… but almost…

So, the IPad is light, easy to carry, and so spontaneous. So far, I have not found it to have enough editing capability to be used for the blog directly… but wow… it is wonderful for most of the blog… So, what I write on the IPad gets emailed to the laptop (I abandoned my last desktop a year ago… so far so good…)

I sometimes travel to places where internet connectivity is limited… for various reasons… Cruise ships for example… their (satellite) connections are slow, and expensive… I buy minutes, but find myself creating posts, editing posts off line, then signing on and posting (or occasionally not… sometimes connections are so slow that nothing works, made more complicated by the need to use email to transfer from the IPad to the laptop)… On land, I have used public library connections, public internet connections… free airport internet connection, and have been known to drive down a street slowly, looking for stray wifi from a house… I once blogged from a camp ground in Mesa Verde from a camp ground… they had wifi at the store, but I used a ranger’s home wifi… Sometimes blog posts are delayed while I go in search of a connection. My newest "smart phone" can serve as a hot spot... so free internet is less important if, in the US and in a place with cell phone coverage...

One issue is difficult to handle is privacy… I have to self censor… On the most recent cruise, my sister in law got sick, scary sick at the time, but once home, ok… I couldn’t, wouldn’t post anything about this until she was home, safe, and her Dr had said so… family members read the blog, and I needed to make sure all was OK… Her sons should not hear about mom from a blog… I need to be careful about blogging about work… people at work read the blog… I work for a city… I am not an official source of information… no city information will go out via the blog… While I don’t expect to ever be looking for a new job, the blog is a reflection of who I am, and I need to be sure that anyone possible future employer who read it would be comfortable with what might appear here. So, sometimes, I sit on posts until I can review what is written…

Time is an issue… I may make notes, even blog posts as I go, but when slowing down, later in the day, I may not feel like reviewing them, editing them (we admit that this is sometimes not as high a priority as some may like, nor is enough care taken) and posting them…

Sometimes the experience gets in the way… I don’t travel to blog… I blog while traveling… but if the traveling demands time, the blog loses…

Increasingly, I am blogging every day, then posting as time allows… on the last trip this meant that sometimes I posted three separate daily posts on one day… after three days of not posting.

I try to post photos… either including one in a post, or uploading an album to Picasa Web, then setting it as a slide show in the little box on the right... this limits the times I can post… photos take more band width… the result has recently been posts without photos… When on a ship, or in a remote location, it is likely that I am depending on satellite based internet connection, and posting photos is an exercise in futility…

So, I blog on...

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