Monday, June 3, 2013

T-102 Days; On Blogging

So apparently, I hate blogging.  I sort of already knew that.  It's a bit like forced journaling, except that when I write in a journal, I don't expect anyone to read it.  Blogging is exactly like journaling, only the oposite.  And instead of being whatever I want to write, or whatever is on my mind, or whatever, it is a focused, concise piece in which I get to ramble about anything I want provided it follows the basic structure of the blog.  In this case, as long as it has to do with studying abroad.

As a writer, I don't actually have a lot of work out there yet.  Most of my close friends and family members have read bits of Honorable Marks, and several of them have read my short story, "The Curator of Forgetting," but other than that, well, I'm not exactly well known.  So I decided to start this blog and have it be all about studying abroad.  So technically, the blog itself falls under the category of the subject, as I wouldn't have it if I weren't going abroad.  Therefore, the following rant definitely falls under the category of "study abroad" and is not therefore to be taken as a silly rant, but a focused and well thought out rant.

That being said, I'm going to put this simply.  I hate this blog.

Now, why would someone hate something they're doing, you ask?  That's a fairly simple question, actually.  Once upon a time, in order to blog you made a blogger account, or a tumblr account, or whatever, and you posted blogs on it.  Easy.  Now, however, its more complicated.  Way more complicated.  If you don't want to pay for a domain, you can still use blogger, but it's connected to Google+, which I have successfully avoided up until now.  You can still use tumblr, which I do, avidly, but mostly to reblog photos of Robert Downing Jr. biting the ridiculous shoulder pads on Gweneth Paltrows dress, or Harry Potter comics.  It's not exactly where I anticipated sharing my travels with the world.  So I made a separate tumblr account for study abroad and all was good.  I did this because, while Blogger is still definitely used, it doesn't reach nearly the audience, and I figure I'll be sharing the link with everyone reading it anyway, so tumblr seemed the best bet, where I could post photos from my phone, check from the road, and reach a young audience.

Problem #1: You need a tumblr account to read a tumblr blog.  Wouldn't be a problem if I weren't planning on sharing this with my family.  Now it's a problem.  So I decided I should make a blogger, write my blogs for tumblr and then copy paste them and put them onto my blogger site.  It's not plagerism, because I'm the writer and I give myself permission.  Seemed foolproof.

Problem #2:  Apparently if you copy and paste into a blogger form, it puts a stupid white text box around each paragraph, so although the background is a lovely, hand selected grey, it is covered in a hideous white text box, especially terrible if you skip a line in between paragraphs like I do.

Problem #3: I have had my three blogs up for most of the morning, and only just now figured out why they look so stupid.

Solution to problems #1 and #2: Write for blogger, copy paste into tumblr.

Solution to problem #3: Apparently the most convaluted process ever.  I had to copy and paste each blog into a word document, reformat it, delete the blog on blogger, and repost it.  I should be happy I didn't need to rewrite the whole damn thing, which I thought I might have needed to do, but mostly I'm just annoyed.  Even better, since I had to back date them, they ended up out of order, and I had to do it all over again.  So basically, I had to tear my hair out and bash my skull against the wall while getting ridiculously angry over why there is no simple solution such as, oh, you know, NOT having it reformat pasted information?

Also my headphones are missing, and I'm broke, so I have no way to replace them.

Okay, lets face it, its a rant.

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