Posted by Raul on July 5, 2010
Reading several blogs I can see that many bloggers are in the long side posts; it is not uncommon to find writings with well over 1000 words. Even many “gurus” about blogging suggest going for no less than 600 words.
The problem for me is that I’m not really a “talking” person and that reflects in this blog; usually I have a hard time going over 500 words in a post and it is common for me to write in the average of 350 with only a few running to 600-700 words
Many of my posts trying to reflect something are very short (independent of if the intention was accomplished or not)
-Lonely Traffic Lights 142 words
-Perspective 412 words
-Inside a Picture 223 words
-The End Once Again 353 words
The other “problem” is that I have a thing for simplicity, the less words that can be used the better (in my opinion). For example: the most important things in life can be described with very few words, like:
-I love you
-I’m here for you
-Are you OK? (I love that one)
-Pass me the salt (a world of difference in the meal)
-I can’t see!
-She died yesterday
-I’m proud of you!
And so many more…
Even my favorite car is about simplicity; no long, big or fancy stuff.
Why not to try and express an idea, a concept or a feeling in the least amount of words possible? I’m not saying that long posts are wrong, but just a matter of personal choice and what works better for everyone.
If I could write very long posts I would be a talkative person in physical life and then I wouldn’t be an Alien Ghost, silently moving among people without being seen so I can observe life around.
I’ve seen many people who simply cannot stop talking all the times and I imagine how long their posts would be if they had a blog.
Can you imagine? Using a simple concept to develop it into an entire book, then paying for printing to pretend being a published author…I just work on cars to annoy my family! 
So, after writing for a while in this blog the concept and suggestions of long posts become discarded and the attempt of reflect a thought or a feeling in the least amount of words become the official task for me (I’ve been doing that all along anyway!)
What’s your preference?
Are you a talkative person in physical life?
Does the amount of words in your blog reflect how talkative you are?
Let me know.
Raul
WOW this one became a long one…442 words!
Posted by Raul on April 23, 2010
I’ve spent the past month working in a customer’s car that was a real lemon! First it was about finding the parts at a good price, then taking them to the machine shop for repairs, to finally putting all together to make it run again…new life for an old, battered engine.
No time to get in this blog to post something; no time to even think of an idea, concept or perception to write about. Now the car is gone and happily running the streets while I get back to the computer and check thinks around the blog.
So far about 70 spam comments in the spam folder and an absence of more than a month from my part (sorry!) Truly time is a runaway when we become busy on other stuff.
So (finally) the time has come to write again and post in this blog and let’s hope no more lemon cars in the area for some time.
Summer is coming! (So they say; it’s been raining for three days now) and with it the possibility of some running around with the Isetta and the opportunity to see more of the outside world and its strange shape and configuration (just kidding! I’ve spent way too much time indoors lately)
How about the movement of time inside a box? It really seems to go at a different rate compared with the outside time, although is just a personal perception and not a fact, still is a reality for everyone many times throughout life.
We spend a good deal of time in a room working in a project and then when we go outside it feels like we were sort of time travelers arriving to a strange location; the weather might be different (sunny or rainy), the time of the day has changed at a different proportion compared with what was expected and we feel tired and dizzy and somehow completely out of place.
Time seems to be moving at a different speed outside compared with inside and we have no control on the situation. Or do we?
How about moving on purpose at a different speed just for the fun of it? Like when we purposely over sleep and wake up knowing we didn’t move in time yet outside time kept running, so we can find ourselves a little bit in the future at once without the wait of walking the minutes.(I told you I’ve spent too much time indoors lately!)
Raul
Posted by Raul on February 8, 2010
It is amazing how “Dumb Person Friendly” is the version 2.9.1 of WP.
After upgrading I spent lots of time adding plugins like a madman (it is fun!). The ventilation fan in my laptop was screaming: “stop it you bastard!”
Since many plugins can be installed just clicking “Install” I tried several just to see what they can do; of course not all of them worked and some even fooled around with the pages moving things as they pleased, so I had to deactivate and delete the big majority of them.
Others had to be installed using Filezilla, so I kept uploading more to the plugging folder. At some point, when opening Filezilla for the “n” time I swear there was a message saying:
“You again?”
“C’mon be nice and upload this one for me, please?”
Still many had to be completed by adding html text in the header.php, sidebar.php, etc, so I spent lots of time with the “Copy and Paste”; update; checking the site to see what happened; going back to change the position of the added script; updating; back to see what happened again, etc.
Throughout this experimentation I learned some basics about the strange language of html ( <p>; </p>; </div>; <h2>; </h2> ), so now the need arises to investigate more about these curious coding systems (html, css, php, etc.)
Definitely Barbara’s idea (Blogging Without A Blog) of using a Test Site is a must. The first four days it was just trying things in this site so to learn how the whole system works, at least enough to know what to do, then on Friday came the time to implement everything in the real blog and it definitely went a lot smoother thanks to the previous experimentation.
So I changed the green color of the header with a picture; used the publicity space in the sidebars for pictures and text; added 400 pluggins (I already told you), etc, and all with a cost of zero dollars using a free Theme and plugins, half a bottle of Aleve for headaches and six gallons of coffee.
It is somehow funny that the Theme that best suited my preferences is called “Bible Scholar” considering that I use it for an “Alien Ghost” blog (Amen!)
Even though the process of updating is completed I still need to keep tinkering with a couple of things here and there, but now I could tell new bloggers:
“I remember the times when we had to upload plugins manually”
“Yes grandpa, you already told us”
So my hopes are that now this blog becomes less “hacker friendly” and more interactive, where people can be “seen” if they take the time to contribute a comment.
It is funny when you think that the mysteries of the universe (or at least the mysteries of computers) little by little and with lots of work can be slowly being deciphered and understood if you are willing to take the challenge and the work that implies to learn them, even if it is the basics.
“Not having enough money to outsource everything is a wonderful thing”
Raul
Posted by Raul on January 29, 2010
The time has come for me to do some upgrading to this blog.
I want to add several elements like gravatars and CommentLuv in the comment section; a list of the people commenting at the right hand of the page, etc, but it seems that the WP version I’m using is too old and tired for that (2.6.1) and also the Theme seems to be too simple for such luxuries, so I’ll be following Barbara’s advice (from http://bloggingwithoutablog.com) and create a test site to experiment for a couple of days before getting into the updating process.
Hopefully, starting this Monday, February 01 and to Friday 05, the whole process would be completed, so there’ll be no posting for that week to dedicate all the time to deal with this infernal computer technology.
Think of it as if, for those of you that don’t have a clue about cars, are going to rebuild the engine with just a bunch of hand tools, no knowledge and/or experience, and using information obtained from Google…there’s going to be bleeding hands and tears!
Fortunately, since this process is about typing and clicking, I doubt there’ll be any bleeding at all, but I’m not so sure about the tears!
So wish me luck and we’ll see what happens, and if you have any advice about this process, it’ll be much appreciated.
Raul
Posted by Raul on November 18, 2009
Definitely computer technology is not my strongest point! It’s been several weeks of work just to get this blog up and running mostly because of the different aspects to deal with.
It is about finding the theme that applies better to what I want to show and the way I want to show it so it’ll reflect not only the content but also the “personality”
Also is about tinkering with little details like implementing a contact form for people to send me emails; I know it is just a pluggin that it is pretty much straight forward to install, but when you have no clue on what you are doing (like me) then a thousand mistakes can and will happen along the process, many times forcing you to delete everything and start all over again!
Then it is about implementing the different pages and their content, the kind and size of letter and the color you want to use, and every time something is changed, everything changes in the page and I can here myself saying “What?? How did that happened!?”
For many of you out there, especially young people, probably all of this stuff is really simple and straight forward, but for someone like me that got into a computer just a couple of years ago, and spent most of that time using the computer just to read emails and keep the family pictures, everything about starting a blog is new and sort of a giant task.
Talking about technology, I wrote all my notes, observations and short tales in Spanish from previous years in my computer so to keep them in a more manageable way and discarded the paper to save room; and to make sure everything was safe I made a copy in an external hard drive just in case, but some time ago my laptop crashed and required a change of hard drive, so all the writings there were lost.
No problem, I have a copy in that external hard drive!
After the laptop was repaired and running again I went to plug the external hard drive to copy all the writings back to my laptop and guess what, it didn’t turn on!
I tried the external hard drive in my son’s computer and nope, nothing happened… the external hard drive is crashed too!
So more than twenty years of writings; about 20 Gigabytes of words were lost in time and space!
I was depressed for about a week!
Well…I guess it can be taken as a motivation to learn this computer technology a little more…and have 10 external hard drives just in case!
Anyway, since the tinkering with the blog is mostly done, the time has come to start pouring some content so I hope you’ll enjoy what I’ll be posting the next couple of days.
Raul
