Gather round, children. Come here, yeah you, come sit on Effing's lap.
A long time ago, way back in April, as I recall, your old uncle Effing started up this here blog. And when he started, he didn't think anyone would notice his foolishness. But after an ego search on the Googly, he found a mention of hisself. And that, children, made your old uncle feel awful good.
(...Later, after old uncle Effing had too much medicine and fell asleep and the children had emptied his pockets of tobacco and French postcards...)
So after that, I felt like this blogging thing is pretty cool. I got invited to join the Library Links, and again, that felt cool.
And then everything was fine. I was having fun posting about pimped book carts and library porn.
But then the day came when I got cocky and posted Sh*t. F*ck. Sh*t. F*ck. over and over until somebody got Blogger to freeze my site and delete the post. And that pissed me off. And it frightened me into submission. After all, I enjoyed posting here and I didn't want to lose it all because some asshole complains about my language. Maybe I should have moved over to livejournal with these guys.
Now if only I had thought about this, I could have used these experiences for some sort of paper on blogging. I wish I'd kept better statistics and a journal of what I did and when (maybe I should have kept a blog about this blog).
But I remember some of the stuff I did, and so here are some recommendations for blog widgets and add-ons and other crap you might want to do.
First, I love Irfanview for images. I used the metallic filter make my eyeball pic in my profile look cool.
I also got a photobucket account for hosting photos.
I got a Gmail account and set up my blogger page with that info.
For my feeds I picked Feedburner. It just seemed easier because Google owns it. And the stats you get about visits and hits and subscribers are awesome. It tracks almost everything that visits your page, human or not.
I thought it would be cool to have a Twitter account, but I didn't want to keep posting there, so I subscribed to Twitterfeed which then required a Yahoo email account and idproxy for that.
From the Space Age Librarian, I got the idea to use Snap for link previews (and again, I used irfanview to create the tiny logo for the Snap window) and Odiogo for mp3s and podcasts of my blog posts. Odiogo is cool because it converts your text pretty quickly after being posted, and as long as you remember to use real words and not too many abbreviations or weird punctuation to confuse it, it sounds all right. And from The Vampire Librarian, I got the idea to use Sitemeter. Sitemeter tracks visitors and you can zoom into the map to see where everybody comes from
(the free version only tracks the last 100 visits).
I use Addthis for bookmarking. And Babel Fish for translating my page into different languages, but I don't know if either of those added any benefit.
And I made my effing logo with WordPerfect that I wrote about here.
And I added the Spring Widget thingy recently.
Stuff I wish I had done:
It would have neat to have ads to earn a few cents, but I've never heard whether any bloggers make anything worth mentioning.
And, of course, the tee-shirts. I know everyone uses Cafepress, but I didn't want to slave over Gimpshop to make an image that would look good on a shirt. Uberprints is cooler, I think, but I'd have to buy the shirts and sell them myself (not gonna).
Anyway, if any of these ideas are useful, then good for you. Otherwise, look around and see what everyone else is using and copy them. Uh oh, the old man's awake.
Hey! Who picked my pockets!
A long time ago, way back in April, as I recall, your old uncle Effing started up this here blog. And when he started, he didn't think anyone would notice his foolishness. But after an ego search on the Googly, he found a mention of hisself. And that, children, made your old uncle feel awful good.
(...Later, after old uncle Effing had too much medicine and fell asleep and the children had emptied his pockets of tobacco and French postcards...)
So after that, I felt like this blogging thing is pretty cool. I got invited to join the Library Links, and again, that felt cool.
And then everything was fine. I was having fun posting about pimped book carts and library porn.
But then the day came when I got cocky and posted Sh*t. F*ck. Sh*t. F*ck. over and over until somebody got Blogger to freeze my site and delete the post. And that pissed me off. And it frightened me into submission. After all, I enjoyed posting here and I didn't want to lose it all because some asshole complains about my language. Maybe I should have moved over to livejournal with these guys.
Now if only I had thought about this, I could have used these experiences for some sort of paper on blogging. I wish I'd kept better statistics and a journal of what I did and when (maybe I should have kept a blog about this blog).
But I remember some of the stuff I did, and so here are some recommendations for blog widgets and add-ons and other crap you might want to do.
First, I love Irfanview for images. I used the metallic filter make my eyeball pic in my profile look cool.
I also got a photobucket account for hosting photos.
I got a Gmail account and set up my blogger page with that info.
For my feeds I picked Feedburner. It just seemed easier because Google owns it. And the stats you get about visits and hits and subscribers are awesome. It tracks almost everything that visits your page, human or not.
I thought it would be cool to have a Twitter account, but I didn't want to keep posting there, so I subscribed to Twitterfeed which then required a Yahoo email account and idproxy for that.
From the Space Age Librarian, I got the idea to use Snap for link previews (and again, I used irfanview to create the tiny logo for the Snap window) and Odiogo for mp3s and podcasts of my blog posts. Odiogo is cool because it converts your text pretty quickly after being posted, and as long as you remember to use real words and not too many abbreviations or weird punctuation to confuse it, it sounds all right. And from The Vampire Librarian, I got the idea to use Sitemeter. Sitemeter tracks visitors and you can zoom into the map to see where everybody comes from
(the free version only tracks the last 100 visits).I use Addthis for bookmarking. And Babel Fish for translating my page into different languages, but I don't know if either of those added any benefit.
And I made my effing logo with WordPerfect that I wrote about here.
And I added the Spring Widget thingy recently.
Stuff I wish I had done:
It would have neat to have ads to earn a few cents, but I've never heard whether any bloggers make anything worth mentioning.
And, of course, the tee-shirts. I know everyone uses Cafepress, but I didn't want to slave over Gimpshop to make an image that would look good on a shirt. Uberprints is cooler, I think, but I'd have to buy the shirts and sell them myself (not gonna).
Anyway, if any of these ideas are useful, then good for you. Otherwise, look around and see what everyone else is using and copy them. Uh oh, the old man's awake.
Hey! Who picked my pockets!
