Tag Archives: blogging

Blogging

Every now and again, despite following 2HelpfulGuys, I get a bit down in the dumps. I’m rarely miserable for long as I tend towards looking on the bright side. In fact, one of the songs I want played at my funeral is Eric Idles version of “Always look on the bright side of life” along with “Gimme Shelter” by the Rolling Stones which I think is the best song ever, “Racing in the Street” by Bruce Springsteen and “Call Me the Breeze” by Lynyrd Skynyrd . Mostly I chose them as a) I like the songs and b) I think they tend to sum me up. Strangely, my favourites, Neil Young and Linkin Park (who I work out to) don’t feature. I hope they don’t get played together any time soon!

I’m going off at a tangent again aren’t I?

 

I was feeling a bit miserable because I was stuck. I was at a loss as to what to write about. So then I read through some of the blogs I follow and got depressed! They were so well written. Tessa at ‘Nothing was Said‘ expressed her excitement over her upcoming interview with the Peace Corps brilliantly. John at ‘Storytime with John’ described his first time skiing with such wit that I nearly wet myself laughing. Steve at BlogBloggerBloggest posted a letter to an 11-year-old that was so immense I actually applauded when I finished reading it. The ‘Chatty Rachel‘ produces prolific amounts of witty one liners and “helpful” suggestions to us blokes on how to increase our desirability to women that crack me up every time I read them. I felt my own writing attempts were crap in comparison. Then I think the sun came out and I realised my writing isn’t crap. It’s different to the blogs I’ve mentioned. I write about different things in a different way and that’s as it should be. I’ve only been blogging since November so I’m still new to it and while my first efforts are somewhat bloated in comparison to my later efforts, I can see an improvement in the way I write and what I write about. My blog is evolving and I’m pleased about that. So now I’m a happy bunny and I see I have many things to write about. If just one person smiles at something I’ve written, says “Too true bud” or even “Thats a load of rubbish you moron” then I’ve achieved what I set out to achieve. I got people to react to what I’m writing. Still have an issue with when and where to use commas and apostrophes though but I’m sure it will get better and hopefully I’ll be forgiven if I mess it up now and again.

 

My thanks to the people I’ve mentioned in this post. They are totally unaware of it but they have inspired me to continue and helped me past my block. I appreciate it.

The_fonz_thumbs_up

 

More Dick soon.

Have a truly inspirational day

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Protocols

I’m new to blogging and I’m amazed to find that other people are following my blog. I thank you all for taking the time to read my stuff. I appreciate it. I follow a number of other blogs such as rachelbeingchatty which now features 15% more sarcasm. It’s certainly sarcastic, very funny, the chatty rachel is prolific, it’s taught me that brevity is good and it just generally cracks me up. I also follow blogbloggerbloggest for entirely different reasons but it too has it’s humerous moments but tends to be more educational. For instance, did you know wasps teleport? Steve Morris, the author of this blog is also a very positive kind of guy. Despite all the mayhem and chaos in the world he was still able to list a whole bunch of reasons to be cheerful and I like that in a person. Then there’s Storytime with John, Nothing Was Said and 2HelpfulGuys plus others that I follow and enjoy. Now here’s the thing. Storytime with John has over 11,000 followers! John tries to follow all those who follow him. Great idea but it must take forever to do that. My question is if someone writing a blog reads yours and decides to follow you, do you therefore have to follow theirs? Am I obligated to return the favour? I don’t know. I don’t have a problem with following other blogs if thats what the done thing is but I’ve got to say that one or two of the blogs that have decided to follow me hold absolutely no interest for me whatsoever. That is not to say they are badly written or have no value. It’s just the subject matter that holds no interest for me. Much as I want to broaden my horizons there is only so much horizon I can take in.

So all you hugely experienced bloggers out there, please let me know what the protocol is. There are enough people out there ticked off with me already. I don’t want any more.

More of the old Dick soon.

Dick_Dastardly

Blogging

When I started this blog I had an idea whereby some of the posts that I publish are linked in some way to previous posts. There would be a thread connecting them. So, for instance, at the end of my first ever post, despite having no medical training, I offered advise on a specific medical condition. In my second ever post I wrote about my experience with that particular medical condition and at the end of it I again offered medical advise on another condition. My third post spoke about that and at the end of that post I offered financial advise and my fourth post was about how having children was economically disastrous. I then posted an email I had sent to my sister Boo some months ago and included a picture that looked nothing like her followed by a post about my sister again with a picture that looked nothing like her. And so on.

Nazz.1

Boo. My sister. She looks nothing like this either.

I thought I was being pretty clever with these threads passing through my posts but then I realised (and I admit to being very slow on the uptake here), that it was all nonsense. The latest post is shown first so if you come in half way through then you have absolutely no idea what I’m on about. Of course, it is possible to have the first post first if you see what I mean but that means you have to plough through loads of older posts you may have already read to get to the latest one. What am I to do? I have thought long and hard about this and finally, earlier today I decided what I’m going to do about it. Fuck all.

Have a great day.

More Dick soon

Dick_Dastardly

Crikey! Starting a blog is hard

For the last few weeks I have been actively encouraged by PIL and my sister to start a blog. I’m not sure why but they say that I write emails and texts in a nice, slightly amusing way. So I thought “Why not”. I started looking into it because I do like to do a bit of research and initially what I read on-line seemed to indicate that starting a blog takes anywhere between 10 to 20 minutes. Bollocks it does! To be frank, I am not the most tech savvy person on the planet and to a degree I shy away from technology. I remember a couple of years ago listening to Larry Wotshisname from Google and he said that everyone on the planet now has a smart phone. I had a steam powered Nokia 3510 in my pocket!It has its place but I think that too many people rely on technology far too much. So it would take me longer than most to get started because I’m such a dinosaur but that’s not the real issue in setting up and starting a blog. What everyone who goes on-line and says “Hey, want to start a blog? Come to my site and together we can set it up in no time and I’ll only charge you a hundred bucks” fails to mention is that you need to make an absolute mass of decisions before you can launch the bloody thing. Stuff like hosted or not, what platform to use and what to call the damned thing in the first place. The name of my blog took ages to decide upon with suggestions coming in thick and fast from my kids and PIL. Most of them were derogatory as you’d imagine and ranged from ‘myworthlesslife’ to ‘whatwhome’ via ‘knobofbutter’. Selecting WordPress was pretty much a no brainer. It gave me what I needed in a simple way but then I had to decide on a theme and there are hundreds of them! Want a blog for your restaurant? There are loads. One for photography? Groovy cos we got tons. Take your pick! Gardening blog? Shed loads of themes. WordPress really are a swiss army knife for blog themes. I’m sure if you look and customise enough you’ll find one that removes small stones from a horses hoof. And no, WordPress aren’t paying me for saying this. So days were spent looking at the hundreds that WordPress offer before a decision was made. Once that was done the rest really was simple and took next to no time for the blog to be set up. However, once that bit has been sorted you can customise the theme you’ve chosen and that could take me ages. I decided not to go down that route too far as it’s something you can go back and do at a future time. Plus. of course, it might be nice to see the site evolve over a period of time. I wanted to get this off the ground sooner rather than later and I’d already spent ages deciding on all kinds of things. Using WordPress also brings some pleasant surprises. One of the first things I did was to write-up the “About” section. Then because I’ve never done this before I thought it would be nice to say that I “liked” that entry. Lo and behold, shortly afterwards I received an email from WordPress saying “You liked your own post on iplonker. You’re so vain. You probably think ‘About’ is about you”! Fantastic. A sense of humour. Excellent, I love that particularly as it took the piss.  So if you decide to start a blog then go for it but ignore all the crap about it being something to do in your lunchtime. You have to make a shed load of decisions beforehand. Once you’ve done that then it really is very easy. Even I can do it and that’s saying something. I won’t mention the amount of help I received from my youngest son. It will just go to his head and he’ll start demanding money, the mercenary swine. During the course of many hours of researching blogs, reading and enjoying other people’s blog and looking at any number of sites explaining how to set up and publicise a blog, I noticed how often “monetising” a blog was referred to. What an ugly word! Got to have been a banker who came up with that and probably, with respect to everyone in the US, it was an American banker that considered that a good word. Us Brits only ever come up with truly good words like “twerp”, “twit”, “bollocks” (my personal favourite), “wanker” and of course “plonker”. It appears to me that to do “monetise” a blog you must have to offer some kind of advisory service or start a website offering expertise. I have no particular talents. I’m not very good at DIY, I have no talent for car or motorcycle maintenance and as I’ve already stated I’m rubbish with technology. So I decided that as I have no talent or specific knowledge on any subject I would offer my advise on something I have experienced. As I have absolutely no medical training apart from a course on “First Aid at Work” I did 20 odd years ago, I thought, on my first ever blog, I would offer advise on a medical matter:

Kidney Stones.

Don’t get them.

They fucking hurt!

I hope you have enjoyed reading my first ever blog as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it. Please feel free to press the good old “Like” button and follow me on this journey in the future. I would love to read your comments too, so please take a moment and let me know what you think.

More to follow really soon. Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Dick Dastardly