blogging

Categories Are Back

…wait, they were gone?

Back when I started this blog I imagined it was going to be filled with posts. To better organize all the posts I expected to later exist I created categories to assign to each post. This would keep posts organized and make it a little easier for readers to perhaps focus on the types of posts they found the most interesting while still following the entire blog.

But the categories I ended up creating were based on what content I had hoped might be on the blog rather than what ended up on the blog. There were too many categories and too much overlap between them. A post could fit into two or three or sometimes more categories. Viewing a particular category would return most of the posts from the site—not quite entirely useful behaviour. Categories were switched off many months ago while I figured out what to do with them.

It turns out I’d only done half—while also too much— of the work when I decided on the initial categories for the blog. The too much work part was making too many categories which could then apply to too many posts. The half of the work part was not using any tags after assigning a category—singular—to a post. Tags could be thought of as sub‐categories, but it’s better to think of them as themes. Themes transcend categories and can apply to any post while categories allow posts to be grouped together based on a broad organizational topic, regardless of each post’s themes. Words are weird. I didn’t understand how categories and tags could fully relate to the other until I thought of them as topics and themes—now the relationship is clear.

Now instead of eight to nine possibly overlapping categories there’s only three to four clearly defined categories. Blog is the default category. It’s where all the day to day entries will live, where the short and silly stuff will be. Writing is where the more formal posts will reside, a place for seriousness—but not all the time. And Photography is where posts featuring photos and image galleries will go. The last category, Scraps, is theoretically for posts which are too short and bloggy to be in Writing, but to much like writing to be in Blog. I don’t see why they can’t just hang out with the regular blog posts for added interestingness or be filled out with a bit more properness for inclusion with the other writing entries. Time will tell. Though I did create the category—with some embarrassing in retrospect fanfare—almost four years ago, and there all of four posts in the category. Maybe time already has. We’ll see…

But, that’s it for categories—except for going back through each post and categorizing it again. Adding tags to each post will be next. And to get the taggin’ train sailing, I’m tagging this post blogging because it’s a blog post about blogging, and pineapple, for obvious reasons. Ah—such clarity.

Spring Cleaning

A March-uly tradition.

Welcome to Day 1 of… blogging.

This isn’t to say the previous 1,712 days haven’t been of blogging, but today is a blog reboot. And just like a reboot on a computer, this reboot clears out any temporary and unused files which have accumulated over time. But unlike a reboot on a computer, these temporary files are not going to just go away—they’re going to become part of the blog, though perhaps not in the way I’d originally intended.

Unfeatured Images

On occasion a post’s featured image is what inspired the entire post, and it’ll be the first thing I add to the page. But most of the time the featured image is found later—either from pictures I’ve already taken or a picture I end up taking. Either way the image is always connected to the post in some way, though that way will sometimes escape even me. I’ll just know that’s the image when I see it—except when it’s not the image. Sometimes a post’s featured image doesn’t work the same way it used to once the post is finished. I’ll replace it with a different image, so the first one usually remains online and unused… Until now!

This was the original image for Covid & Carbon back when it was called Cars & Carbon:

One of the reasons Politics was as long as it ended up being was it was originally three different posts. This was the featured image for one of them:

Remember back in February how worried the federal and provincial governments were about the rail blockades crippling the economy? Turns out the economic damage was minimal, and certainly entirely insignificant compared to what’s happening to it now.

Calvin and Hobbes

At one point I wanted to include panels from Calvin and Hobbes as—for lack of a better description—thematic assistance. I decided against it, but not before tracking down this one panel:

No, Calvin—it makes even less sense once you grow up…

The above was to feature in a post called Anger, but after a few paragraphs the post was headed in an unreadable, toxic direction. I abandoned it, though some of its themes ended up in Covid & Carbon and Politics instead.

Unused Images

There are times when I come across an image and decide it would make a great addition to a post, but then the post in mind never gets drafted, or the nature of the post changes and the image no longer fits.

I don’t know where I thought I’d use this image, but it is among the coldest yet warmest images I’ve ever come across. So flooofy:

And speaking of flooofy:

There’s a cat in there somewhere.

And coincidentally enough, I believe that’s also what both Doug Ford and Justin Trudeau are thinking about the other in this delightful pre‐handshake moment:

A stark contrast to this image where neither Stephen Harper nor Rob Ford are thinking about the other.

Rob Ford had a truly amazing ability to always be in front of the cameras yet never aware of them.

So that’s it! All the leftover images from behind the scenes have been cleaned up. I’ve made some creative decisions about what draft posts will be officially abandoned and which ones I’d like to complete. There’s also some category and tagging functionality built into the blogging software that I’ve rediscovered and will hopefully be using properly going forward.

But for now, on to Day 2—whenever that will be.

Back to basics.

The current iteration of this blog is approaching its 100^th post. And it’s actually this post that’s the 100^th post—if I count the draft posts as well. What an almost achievement!

To celebrate the blog’s near milestone—wait, kilometrestone…? Yes, sounds preposterous, perfect—to celebrate the blog’s near kilometrestone I thought I’d look up what the word blog means.

I vaguely recalled covering the history of blogging in school a long time ago, and I presumed it has something to do with the idea of a log, but I couldn’t remember where the b came from. Turns out the b is leftover from the word web because the word blog is leftover from the word weblog, referring to a log kept on the world wide web. The idea of a web log—and the world wide web itself—goes back to the internet of the late 90s, back to when only the word internet was capitalized, back to when only access to a university or a computer connected to a modem on a landline was needed to send an email, sorry, an E‐mail.

With the above in mind, my first blog was from 1996. It was part of a website I had hosted on GeoCities, another internet blast from the past, where I was keeping track of my search for a classic Mini. The website itself was mostly information and pictures I’d found while researching the different production models of the car, plus a few pictures of the two Minis I eventually came to own. But what happened to the website and blog remain a mystery. GeoCities was bought by Yahoo! in 1999, and this might have been around the time when I left the platform, but I don’t remember specifically. There’s no trace of the original files from the website in my archives—though that’s not too surprising as I seem to have no record of anything I produced using a computer from before my last year of high school. Again with the gaps…

My second blog was on LiveJournal—yet another internet blast from the past. This blog ran for ten years, from June 2002 to June 2012, but it’s not available online anymore either. LiveJournal attempted to monetize itself during the mid to late 2000s and it resulted in advertising being displayed with user‐created content, a practice LiveJournal said they would never engage in. By then the LiveJournal platform had become increasingly popular, particularly among Russian users, leading to its somewhat suspicious purchase by a Russian media company in late 2007. Initial promises to LiveJournal users indicated nothing would change on the platform, but these promises were made by the same company who had previously broken previously promised promises so it wasn’t a complete surprise when the site’s daily operations and content were incrementally moved to Russia.

Though I had stopped posting on LiveJournal years prior, I decided to remove all of my posts and close my LiveJournal account when I was asked to confirm none of my content was in violation of Russia’s internet censorship laws and to agree to a new terms of service document available only in Russian. I didn’t want to agree to what I couldn’t read, plus I was pretty sure my content would be non‐complaint anyway, what with my refusal to portray any non‐traditional view of sexuality as abnormal.

This was all around the time Twitter had become more popular. Paragraphs of text had become too much to hold the attention of the average Twitter-net user. They weren’t interested in content as an exercise in retrospect. They wanted moment‐driven content, just a sentence or two will do, and skip the context. Anything more represents too much of an investment in something other their own experience. Microblogging, it was called. I was skeptical, but I joined in for the ride regardless and created several Twitter accounts between 2009 and 2013. I played with the platform, trying to pack the most context disguised as content I could into the 140 character limit of each post. Sometimes I’d include photos with my words, visual tweets I called them. I wanted to explore what was possible when an entire page wasn’t available to use.

But then the advertising came, as it seems to always. And this time it was incredibly targeted. Ads would look just like another Twitter user’s post and would sit among them, hoping to be thought of as just another kind of friend. Twitter quickly became a numbers game. How many retweets, how many likes, how many replies… There was no point in crafting context into content, no point in thinking subtlety, no point in extending thought an invitation. It was all about generating advertising through chatter, all about mapping the connections between the influences and the followers. By 2013 there were racks of computers dedicated to keeping track of not only what Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber had for lunch, but what their millions of followers also had for lunch, as well as the ads from corporate restaurant chains ready to sell them a sandwich. I walked away from the platform in December of 2015, only to revisit for a few months a year later, to then walk away from it again. My last tweet was in December of 2017.

Which brings me to this blog, my third blog. Created in 2015 as a rejection of the ad‐driven microblogging trend, this blog would always be free of advertising because it was run out of my own pocket. The only thing remotely resembling an advertisement on this blog is the top sidebar graphic for my digital photobook Reflex. It’s so unobtrusive it has yet to produce a single sale since I added it to the site a few months ago—incidentally proving why I’m in content creation and not marketing.

Aversions to advertising aside, this blog was primarily intended to get myself used to regular long form writing again, a return to writing words instead of counting letters. The end of this year will mark 5 years since the first post, and at just about 100 posts since then I don’t believe the original goal of producing regular writing has been achieved. The intent was a post every few days, but right now it’s averaged to a post every few months—better than nothing, and I understand there’s some good posts in there—but especially in the earlier posts, it’s a lot of therapy sessions with myself in blog form, or me writing about not being able to write. To be honest the blog has never quite lived up to my expectations, but the fault isn’t with the blog, it’s with my expectations, or at least what they turned into over the last year or so.

In looking up the origins of the word for blog I’ve been reminded of its core concept: that of a log, something entered into regularly, and perhaps something that tracks progress, but certainly something that documents either specific or random events. However; at some point I started writing what I consider now to be a few too many heavy posts, posts where it takes me days or weeks to finish them, posts with topics such as institutionalized racism, climate change, and political ignorance. I got to a place where if I didn’t think I could turn the topic into something profound, then the post couldn’t sit among the more proper writing previously posted. But what makes a post proper writing? In every post all the words are (usually) spelled correctly and are (mostly) arranged in the correct order. Can’t get much more proper than that. And what about my older content? Can it reconcile with proper’s stuffy and appropriate overtones? Is Life With Tina proper enough to be on the same site as Mental Illness? Or what about The McPizza? That followed Politics, a post where I implied the role of the Canadian government in a cultural genocide.

I started this blog because I wanted a place where I could produce and share content I found interesting without it being turned into a popularity contest or aggregated into targeted advertising, but the blog is now in danger of becoming too thoughtful, too heavy, too unbalanced. I need to stop overworking a post into something more than it sometimes is. Some posts start and happen just as they’re written, where all I’m doing is trying to keep up with the words coming out of my thoughts rather than trying to corral them first with words I’ve already written. And some posts start and become silly almost immediately. These effortless and silly posts are what I need to fill in the gaps between the heavy posts—the ones that take so much out of me. This post is an effortless one, with just a hint of silly. I started writing it a few hours ago, and here it is, a few hours later, all finished—well, finished for you. For me I still have to produce the final paragraph.

And here it is, ready for posting on this, the almost achievement of—yet technically still—the 100th post to my first blog that’s actually my third. But, I mean, this isn’t Twitter. Who’s keeping track of the numbers anyway? Is this a paragraph yet? Perhaps another couple more sentences, or maybe just another near run‐on rager that’s almost a couple sentences but isn’t, like what’s just happened now.

Or do you need my help?

You again?!

I keep telling you: I never go anywhere—I just sometimes don’t say anything.

Or if we can step outside the narrative for a moment, perhaps then…

Who the hell is this?

And—scene.