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Wednesday, April 1, 2020

The KISS Principle at Work

For someone who has tinkered with electronics and computers since the early 80s, I'm a bit of a low tech guy when it comes to blogging.

The Blogger suite is one that worked just fine a decade ago, but Google has pretty much abandoned it for no good reason (or at least one that I've heard), so the toolset is --to put it charitably-- lacking in modern conveniences.

You'd think that a company that owns both Blogger and YouTube would find a way to seamlessly integrate YouTube channels into a Blogger Widget so that you can see the latest entry in each channel, but that isn't the case. You don't even have much of an option to easily tinker with designs the way you can with Wordpress; if I'm going to study code at home, it's not going to be to customize my own blog but focus on enhancing my work skillset.

But I will say that Blogger is much more customizable than LiveJournal (or Dreamwidth, which is largely the successor to LJ), so it's not exactly the bottom of the barrel as blogging platforms go.

Regardless, the blog hasn't exactly changed much in terms of design since Cataclysm came out*, and every time I've tinkered with something --such as replacing the leading graphic with a GIF-- I discover that I have to pay in order to get the kind of GIF design I really want.**

Writing for PC is straightforward, too: I utilize the Blogger post page and just write when I can. I used to use Word and then transfer it over the old fashioned way (by cut and paste), but I'd found that Office was a huge resource hog on my laptop and just writing in Blogger itself was simpler. I have occasionally tried scheduling a post, but for some reason that never seems to work properly for me, so I decided that I'll post when I post. And yes, that means I'm really awake on those oddball middle-of-the-night posting times.

Why? Because that's when I get most of my writing done.

***

Like I mentioned on the 10 year blogoversary post for PC, I prefer to write at night when there's a lot of solitude. I'm a night owl, and doing things when the sun goes down appeals to me, whether it's gaming, writing, or tinkering with various other hobbies.*** A writer acquaintance of mine used to set a timer over his lunch hour at his work and try to see just how many words he could cram into a single session. And there are other writer friends who have chat sessions going through the day --the War Room, they call it-- and set up 5-10 minute challenges to see just how many words they can put onto (virtual) paper during those times.

So my writing approach is threefold: write what you want, when you want to, and edit/publish when you feel like it.

Not a bad gig overall, as long as you keep up with posting.

#Blapril2020





*Did the graphic give it away?

**The free ones simply don't cut it. There's a specific time limit, and the more images you select the less time those images spend on-screen. And, to be honest, the images would need editing and whatnot, and that inevitably means using Photoshop or one of its competitors/relatives to get what I want.

***I used to work on homework sets while I attended UD during the late evening and overnight hours. I got to know the overnight DJs of the Dayton area radio stations quite well, whether they were a national feed (Peter Van de Graaf for WDPR) or totally local (the DJs for WTUE, WAZU, and WOXY). I always meant to call WTUE up at 3 AM and ask for something obnoxious to keep me awake while doing homework, but when 3 AM hit I was far more interested in just finishing the damn stuff up so I could go to sleep.

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