Blogs and bloggers, Part 3

Last entry on the subject. I promise.

 I noted that I started this caper in 2005.  Back then, things were more complicated. You wanted a link, you had to start with a href="URL" target="_blank">TEXT

, then insert the URL and the relevant text. (I purposely left out two <, because if I didn't, it actually worked). Which is more than it sometimes did when that was the only way to link. I can’t remember how we got photos into the text, but looking back to my cheat sheet I discovered the enigmatic code which resulted in this—

 I did want to jazz up the format a bit, so I figured out how to find a color number I wanted (I think it is 7E3517 here) and how to use it to frame a photo ( maybe the above photo frame.)  It worked fine, but when Blogger made things “easier” it meant that I lost the right hand frame of a large photo. You can see an example in my last post. I could probably fix that, but when the instructions tell you to start by making a copy of everything before you begin in case you lose it all, it’s a bit off-putting.

The choice of templates was few when I started, but I knew I wanted something simple. In fact I think this is called minima. I’m not sure it is exactly what I want, but I don’t want to mess around with it. Some of the changes installed by Blogger coincided with my “time off”, so it was doubly hard to figure out what was going on. I didn’t feel like wading through Blogger Buzz. The changes seemed to make it easier to install a header and I was able to change the color of the background. I was aiming for butter yellow, but . . . ”They” say that I can just click on another template, and everything will be moved over seamlessly, but I think that is too much to hope. Obviously I am not the only blogger wanting to jazz up my current template and we have seen the introduction of Shabby Blogs and hot biggity blog and decorations that seem a little twee. And I do want to change the font, but it seems to me I should have figured that out on day one.

A few more points. I do think branding is important, so I don’t see the point of continually making changes, though I like seasonal changes for the header. Nor do I want to clutter up the margins that minima provides. In fact, I am going to think about the widgets I use right now and clean them up. Well, soon anyway.

Should a person display a list of “favorites”? I think I will continue to do so, but I will edit my list. It seems silly to display links to people who haven’t written for weeks. Then one feels as if the links belong to a slightly recalcitrant child, or a small dog, and feel a tad abashed.

How do I chose new blogs to read on a regular basis? That is a hard one now there is a plethora of blogs to chose from. I often go from link to link, but somehow very rarely bookmark a new blog. Some I never give a chance if the post I link to doesn’t do it for me. And I immediately close down the blog if it looks too political, religious, philosophical, crammed with photos of small babies or (forgive me some of you) animals. And if after a few seconds your blog starts to talk to me or play New Age music—that’s it. I do need to widen my horizon. In the early days I used to click on the “next blog” button at the top and after a blog or two I was invariably linked to a Japanese porn site. I read somewhere that now there is an algorithm in place which sends you to blogs a similar nature to the one you are on.

Comments. Do you look for a certain number of comments on each post? How many, if any, do you make per day? And if any one feels like making a comment, I would like to know your feelings about some of the points I have raised. Do you ever think about this stuff any more? 

Philosophical comments will be accepted.