blogging – Page 3 – Close Read

Returning to WordPress… fourth time round.

My blog got me my job. After all, it did make a cameo appearance during my interview, drawing an “Impressive!” from the Editor of the newspaper sitting opposite me. Ever since that episode in early June, I decided that I was justified in spending almost three hours on it each day, checking the stats, making small changes to the design, keeping an eye out for new options and themes, weeding out spam comments, etc.

It is also since then that I have been comfortable spending some money on it. First, I bought a domain, set up some space at Hostgator, and set up WordPress. That didn’t last long because I had a bad time with Hostgator. It could’ve just been that once, but I decided to move. Next in line was Posterous, but once I learnt that it was being bought by Twitter, I decided to move again. I didn’t like the idea of my blog’s host being affiliated with a social networking service, you see.

The third option was Blogger. While its immense flexibility was welcoming, I found it too… unclassy, if I may say so. It didn’t proffer any style of its own, nor did it show any inclination for it. While WordPress.com restricts access to themes’ CSS files, Blogger has almost no restrictions nor offerings. This means that if I wanted a particularly styled theme, I’d have to code it up from scratch, instead of being able to choose from over 200 themes like in WordPress. That much of flexibility isn’t always great, I learnt.

The final stop was Squarespace. At the end of the day, Squarespace doesn’t fall short on many counts (if it falls short at all). For $96 p.a., it offers one free domain, 20 GB of hosting space, a wealth of templates all easily customized, and a minimalist text editor that I think I will miss the most. Where I think it doesn’t match up to WordPress is social networking.

Bloggers on WordPress have the option of following other blogs, liking posts, sharing stuff they like on their own blogs, and generally availing the option to interact more strongly than just by sharing posts on Facebook/Twitter or leaving comments. In fact, I think WordPress also has a lot of “bloggers” who don’t have blogs of their own but are logged in to interact with authors they like.

So, for the fourth time, I returned to WordPress… and here I am. Will I continue to be here? I don’t know. I’m sure something else will come along and I’ll put some of my money in it, perhaps only to find out why WordPress is so awesome for the fifth time.

Eschatology

The meaning of the day of the blog is changing. While some argue that long-form journalism is in, I think it’s about extreme-form journalism. By this, I only mean that long-forms and short-forms are increasingly doing better, while the in-betweens are having to constantly redefine themselves, nebulously poised as they are between one mode that takes seconds to go viral and another mode that engages the intellectual and the creative for periods long enough to prompt protracted introspection on all kinds of things.

Having said this, it is inevitable that this blog, trapped between an erstwhile obsessed blogger and a job that demands most of his time, eventually cascade into becoming an archive, a repository of links, memories, stories, and a smatter of comments on a variety of subjects – as and when each one caught this blogger’s fancy. I understand I’m making a mountain out of a molehill. However, this episode concludes a four-year old tradition of blogging at least 2,000 words a week, something that avalanched into a habit, and ultimately into a career.

Thanks for reading. Much more will come, but just not as often as it has.

A revisitation inspired by Facebook’s opportunities

When habits form, rather become fully formed, it becomes difficult to recognize the drive behind its perpetuation. Am I still doing what I’m doing for the habit’s sake, or is it that I still love what I do and that’s why I’m doing it? In the early stages of habit-formation, the impetus has to come from within – let’s say as a matter of spirit – because it’s a process of creation. Once the entity has been created, once it is fully formed, it begins to sustain itself. It begins to attract attention, the focus of other minds, perhaps even the labor of other wills. That’s the perceived pay-off of persevering at the beginning, persevering in the face of nil returns.

But where the perseverance really makes a difference is when, upon the onset of that dull moment, upon the onset of some lethargy or the writers’ block, we somehow lose the ability to set apart fatigue-of-the-spirit and suspension-of-the-habit. If I no longer am able to write, even if at least for a day or so, I should be able to tell the difference between that pit-stop and a perceived threat of the habit starting to become endangered. If we don’t learn to make that distinction – which is more palpable than fine or blurry most of the time – then we will have have persevered for nothing but perseverance’s sake.

This realization struck me after I opened a Facebook page for my blog so that, given my incessant link-sharing on the social network, only the people who wanted to read the stuff I shared could sign-up and receive the updates. I had no intention earlier to use Facebook as anything but a socialization platform, but after my the true nature of my activity on Facebook was revealed to me (by myself), I realized my professional ambitions had invaded my social ones. So, to remind myself why the social was important, too, I decided to stop sharing news-links and analyses on my timeline.

However, after some friends expressed excitement – that I never quite knew was there – about being able to avail my updates in a more cogent manner, I understood that there were people listening to me, that they did spend time reading what I had to say on science news, etc., not just from on my blog but also from wherever I decided to post it! At the same moment, I thought to myself, “Now, why am I blogging?” I had no well-defined answer, and that’s when I knew my perseverance was being misguided by my own hand, misdirected by my own foolishness.

I opened astrohep.wordpress.com in January, 2011, and whatever science- or philosophy-related stories I had to tell, I told here. After some time, during a period coinciding with the commencement of my formal education in journalism, I started to use isnerd more effectively: I beat down the habit of using big words (simply because they encapsulated better whatever I had to say) and started to put some effort in telling my stories differently, I did a whole lot of reading before and while writing each post, and I used quotations and references wherever I could.

But the reason I’d opened this blog stayed intact all the time (or at least I think it did): I wanted to tell my science/phil. stories because some of the people around me liked hearing them and I thought the rest of the world might like hearing them, too.

At some point, however, I crossed over into the other side of perseverance: I was writing some of my posts not because they were stories people might like to hear but because, hey, I was a story-writer and what do I do but write stories! I was lucky enough to warrant no nasty responses to some absolutely egregious pieces of non-fiction on this blog, and parallely, I was unlucky enough to not understand that a reader, no matter how bored, never would want to be presented crap.

Now, where I used to draw pride from pouring so much effort into a small blog in one corner of WordPress, I draw pride from telling stories somewhat effectively – although still not as effectively as I’d like. Now, astrohep.wordpress.com is not a justifiable encapsulation of my perseverance, and nothing is or will be until I have the undivided attention of my readers whenever I have something to present them. I was wrong in assuming that my readers would stay with me and take to my journey as theirs, too: A writer is never right in assuming that.