June 27, 2013
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Another Day, Another 2 or 3 Blog Entries
I’ve been trying to think back about how I built my xanga community. When I first started blogging here I “knew” two or three bloggers from a yahoo listserve and I subscribed to them immediately. I brought one “friend” with me from another website…she long ago abandoned her Xanga. I met a couple of people in blogrings.
And then after that it was just a long, slow process of seeing who read my blog, responding to comments, etcetera. One of my blogs got on “Featured Posts” back when we had featured posts on Xanga. It wasn’t meant to attract attention. It was kind of mean-spirited, actually, a satire of a post that had been on the front page for several days. It brought me new people to meet, though. Later I did a fiction scavenger hunt and met many people that way. Probably some people found me through recommend, which is different from “like” in that the blogs my wordpress community “likes” don’t show up on my reader. So if you “like” someone’s post on wordpress, I never find out about it.
As far as I know. WordPress has a bewildering array of capabilities and options.
So the question I’ve been asking myself is: will I be able to create the same sense of community for myself on wordpress?
I started on wordpress with a much larger group of internet friends. I miss some of the Xangans I loved the most who almost never show up over there, but I’ve been surprised by the increased interaction I’ve had with others. It’s funny about that. Your online friendships can be strangely myopic. It’s not always the people you interact with most online who turn out to be your biggest fans or your most compatible friends. There are bloggers on Xanga whom I like and respect who wouldn’t know my username if I was wearing it on a Xanga t-shirt in 25-point print. And there are people who read my blog whom I almost never hear from or see. I try to be sensitive to that. You don’t want to ignore someone if you can help it. But it’s hard when you can’t physically see them, standing on the edge of the circle.
None of this to say that my daily peeps, the ones I interact with all the time, aren’t still my faves and my besties. You are, of course. You know who you are.
I’ve met a couple of non-xangans on wordpress (eeek, gah, hiss, boo) already. I tend to think other wordpressians have established their communities entirely on wordpress, by meeting people off “Freshly Pressed,” the wordpress equivalent to Top Blogs, and by tagging their entries and who-knows-what-other publicizing methods. Maybe some of them are “out” in their writing and link to their FB page or tweet about their blogs with their real-life friends. I don’t know.
One interesting feature of wordpress is the ability to create multiple blogs on the same account. I haven’t done this yet, but I’ve almost done it. I’ve set up a second blog under my ordinarybutloud account for fiction scavenger hunts, present and future. I tend to blog along two or three or even four lines on xanga: personal musings and diary entries; issue-based rants or musings; rants or musings about my desire and efforts to become a published writer; fiction related to the scavenger hunts or prompts I’ve found on xanga. I find that my readers individually don’t tend to like all four types of blogs. Some people are bored out of their heads with my personal life, others hate my issue-based posts (particularly when they don’t match with their own opinions), and still others don’t like to read my fiction. On xanga they just skip those days. On wordpress perhaps they could “follow” the blog that correlates with the topic they like and ignore the rest of my crap.
I no longer have a good sense of how likely it is that xanga will become Xanga 2.0. I’m still troubled by the questions I had in the beginning that haven’t been answered and I’m also kinda wondering, if you can make a new start with $60,000, why can’t you make a new start with $35,000? I’ll admit I have no idea what it costs to rent servers or what-have-you. But $60,000 feels like a number picked out of a hat to me. It would be nice, as investors, to know where the $60,000 will go, and why $35,000 is not enough. I realize technically xangans aren’t investors. They’re getting nothing in return for their venture capital. They’re just donors. I’m still having a hard time wrapping my mind around that concept, too. A business, funded by donations. A for-profit business, getting its venture capital in the form of pledges.
Anyway.
It looks like there were more things than I thought clogging up my creative process today.
Comments (8)
Now that you mention it, perhaps liking something on WP makes things show up in your “People you know like this” feed. You know, the little vertical Brady Bunch squares.
I think compartmentalizing your entries might sort of fragment your output. So to speak. Off to chuck e cheese.
If I set up separate blogs for separate areas it would seem like I never blog! I added different categories for myogs instead – update, recipes and interesting ideas maybe. Not sure how that shows on the reader but makes it easy to search for my recipes again
@distractedbyzombies - Oh, that’s right, “liking” stuff does influence that. Sometimes it tells me “read this because you liked this other thing.”
Your article had me wonder when participating in social networking will be taxed just like we are taxed for the roads we drive on. Computers will eventually have to be licensed on our birthdays, just like our cars’ tags have to be updated annually. It’s coming. Scary. (That’s where my mind goes when it comes to present day fiction. If someone hasn’t already written the book, I’ll be kicking myself for planting this seed and making it come true!). You are a good spokesperson for both Xanga and WordPress.
@sleekpunk - thanks.
@distractedbyzombies - yes, and I’ve decided that the “reblog” feature is like recommend. I mean, instead of recommending your post, people just reblog it on their own sites, which amounts to the same thing. @trivial_lover - wordpress has categories too, which I guess can function as a way to separate your posts without having different blogs.
@ordinarybutloud - I’m too shy to reblog.
@distractedbyzombies - don’t be shy! Be bold!
@ordinarybutloud - well if I can blame it on you, I’ll totally be bold.