Metablogging

This is more for me than it is for my readers, but I felt that my readers would benefit from this too, especially if some my readers are fellow bloggers. 

Since I’m nearly thirty posts into this blog, I thought I’d take some time to reflect on this blog, my writing style, and the challenges I face when writing on this blog. I’ll also give you a bit of info about me, too.
 

Cybermantics, The Blog

 

First, this blog. This blog is written with the purpose of celebrating my love of technology and my love of culture. I often intermix the two when writing to showcase just how technology influences culture, and the inverse, how culture influences technology. Before this blog, I was a fan of social commentary. This blog is the result of me combining my love of social commentary with my, more recent, love of technology.

I have a rather unfortunate habit of starting things and never finishing them. Over the years, I’ve learned to be a bit more patient with myself and my endeavors. My posting goal is to upload a post at no greater than five day intervals. I know I won’t always achieve this goal. I don’t believe in pushing myself to write and post every single day because I know, if I do, I’ll burn myself out. And that’s no fun. This isn’t a “for-profit” blog (despite the “donate” button). It’s a for-fun blog. If I’m not having fun, then why would I post? 

Writing Style 

 

I’m still fairly new to writing social commentary, and writing in general, so I constantly face challenges when writing about worthy subjects. I had one blog prior to this one. That blog was on a completely different subject matter though, so the transition to writing about technology was difficult to make since I also did a lot of social commentary on my previous blog. Though I’ve been writing for a little over a couple years, I’m still trying to find my writing style. I opt for a mixture of formal and informal, question and answer styles. I don’t mind being serious from time to time, and I love to be silly and facetious. 

Challenges

 

Some of the challenges I face are staying on topic (both staying in tune with the blog’s purpose and staying in tune to a particular post’s theme), formatting, clunky writing, consistent formatting, paragraph transitions, tagging my posts, and organizing the content of my posts. Perhaps the biggest of these challenges is staying on topic while keeping my post content reasonably organized. I’ve been known to branch off into irrelevant (or relevant, yet out of place) rants and ideas, but, I suppose that’s part of the fun and full-part of the blogging experience. 

One of the more irritating challenges I face while writing is figuring out how to end a post. It’s irritating to start off so strong, yet finish so weakly.
I’ve also been trying to strike a balance between simplicity and complexity. Most of my posts are rather short and simple, and thusly, read rather clunky. I’m a fan of concise posts. I’ve yet to figure out how to make my posts concise and readable!

Finally, a particularly irritating challenge for me as of late is knowing when to stop writing. Sometimes, I can keep writing, writing, writing forever. I’ll spend tons of time making a post the most perfect it can possibly be, and it’s difficult for me to know just when to stop. This is another reason why I set the goal of making one post at least every five days. When that five days is up, I post what I got no matter the quality. Usually the quality is more than sufficient.
And then there are times when I feel that I posted something prematurely, so then I worry about that. ARGH!!! Why is something like blogging so stressful! 

Signing Off

 

All of the subjects I write about are worthy of discussion (some worthier than others), which is why I write about them. I can only hope that my writing ability does sufficient justice to the topics I write about. One of my longer term goals for this blog is to post consistently for the length of a year. I’m happy to say that I’m over two months into that goal. I’ve got a long way to go and I don’t know if I’ll make it. But, if I don’t make it, I’ll put in a heroic effort before failing.

Some quirks and facts about my style/posts/posting habits:

• I don’t like to make more than one post a day since, when I do, my blogging template “runs” the posts together and makes it seem like two posts are one giant post
• I have a rather irritating habit of using the word “that” too much in my posts. I hope to change that…dammit!
• I try to put in at least one hour of writing, per day. It doesn’t always happen, but it’s good to have goals
• I use the words “machine” and “computer” / “articles” and “posts” / “conscious” and “ghost” interchangeably
• I can’t figure out which font size I prefer
• I’m terrible at citing my image sources. I would like for my readers to know that none of the images used belong to me.
• I don’t usually make corrections to my past posts because, when I re-upload the post after the correction is performed, it screws with all the links that linked to that post. I’ve decided let past imperfections become beauty marks.