Being a personal blogger is a lot like being a musician actually: the best of them can use it to make their living but the vast majority of musicians have to have a day job of some description to pay the rent. In the same way, personal bloggers need some other angle to make them interesting enough for the ordinary guy (the Joe Bloggs, heh) to want to read the blog. For this reason, I talk about tech a lot here too.

That probably makes it sound as if bloggers’ primary goal is to get readers. This is probably true of some but not all. I know that I’d still blog if nobody read me, but since that isn’t the case, I write for people. You do too — maybe not when it comes to blogging but maybe in speaking? Do you talk to your mate in the pub the way you talk to an audience?

Photo owned by Incase. (cc)

For what it’s worth, I’ve always maintained that public speaking is something that should be taught in schools (but you probably wouldn’t make a University degree out of it) alongside Maths, Irish or Geography. These are the ways we train our kids for the world — not with trigonometry or studying the Neolithic Peoples. Parents: get your kids into drama groups and the like. We need people who are able to talk confidently to a group.

• grown and evolved, moved out of his parent’s home (off a .blogspot.com domain) and into his own place (trusttommy.com).
• received 2,650 actual comments and 4,282 spam ones
• been the basis of a Young Scientist project and spawned a sister (albeit one I’m no longer affiliated with)
• had 105,717 unique visitors and 151,638 hits

I think that my brother deserves a mention here. It’s thanks to John that Trust Tommy has such a stellar uptime to downtime ratio. I can only ever remember two times in as many years that this blog was down, and only for as many hours. It’s stayed up for everything else (including getting 10,000 hits in a space of about 3 hours, but that’s a story for another post) and for that reason, thank you, John :)

Also, thank you, the people who read TT. I blog for you!

I’ve been playing around with different themes on the blog here over the past day or so. I was growing tired of themes in general, or at least the sort I’d been using. Blogs are all about the content that you write; yet so many (including mine up to recently) are so full of irrelivant bells and whistles. I go to blogs to read their content; that’s it.

I’m not alone in this either. At least, I don’t think I am. I believe that the rise of RSS can be attributed in part to people wanting to get the blogposts and not the entire blog.

I’m still looking for a theme I’m 100% happy with. I think it’s like mobile networks in Ireland though, in that I’m never gonna find one that I’m completely happy with. I’m going for something along the lines of Paul Graham’s essays, look-style wise.

People who are starting blogs often think that nobody will read their blog unless it looks pretty and has x or y plugin or whatever. The truth is that good content is pretty much all you need to make it big. As far as themes go, you’ll be fine so long as you don’t have a butt-ugly one (rule of thumb, no light text on dark backgrounds).

However, I’m back now so it’s all back to normal.

…Or, at least as normal as one can expect ’round these here parts.

Today, this has been rectified, and normal service shall resume in the regular time-slot tomorrow.

Apologies for the drop in programming this afternoon. I tried to update WordPress to 2.9 and next thing I knew, I couldn’t reach my blog. Or Mum’s blog, or indeed John’s (*tumbleweed blows by*) blog.

The man himself was asleep when I fubared the server, so I went off and watched the 3rd episode of Glee (my new love). John got up about an hour ago and fixed it though :-)

Normal programming back now!

1. Jazz Biscuit’s CC Search
link

Jazz Biscuit is a site that searches Flickr’s (one the biggest image hosting websites out there) CC photos. CC stands for Creative Commons, and refers to photos that the author has allowed to be used elsewhere, sometimes with strings. The most common are that you have to link back to them (the original author, which Jazz Biscuit does automagically) and that you can’t sell the images.

It’s by far the easiest image website out there – working on what I call the simple ‘press button, receive stuff’ concept (based on this) – there’s no registration involved no nothing.

The only downside is that it only searches though posts people have tagged – which leads to two problems: firstly, people who are lazy and don’t tag their photos or add any CC license don’t get their pictures noticed. Secondly, people who abuse the tagging feature – either by applying tags of no relevance to their photo to gain views or by the more innocent simply uploading 80 photographs of the same event with the same tags screw up the search process.

2. SXC.hu – Stock Photography
link

This is a stock imagery site, so the photos are all staged, but in some ways that’s good. It’s a bit of a fail though because you need to register. The process is relatively pain-free though, and the benefits once you do are quite nice. SXC differs also from Jazz Biscuit because all the images are much bigger – usually about 2 MBs; and a lot larger in size: 3000px photos are the norm over there.

Both are very good sites which I use regularly, and would highly recommend :)

It would seem like the natural step forward, then, to want to write a novel. I could never do that though. I look at some of the books I read and marvel about how much detail goes into every single book, and it overwhelms me. I can manage basic plots but the depth at which some authors bring to their characters is, being honest, a little scary. I was never able to describe any of my characters past their superficial hopes, dreams and failings.

That’s why, I think, I went for blogging: I can write about a given subject one day, and once I finish talking about it – I leave it go and the next time I come back to write, I can think about something completely different, which is nice. My attention span for these sorts of things is a little bit lackluster, so this ‘love and leave’ blog thing I’ve got going really does suit me down to the ground.

One of my (many) aspirations in life, however, is to write a book. I think that a book is a wonderful imprint of the author, even if it’s fiction. Especially if it’s fiction, in fact. When I read a book, I want to be told a story. Good storytelling is hard to come by these days. Books, I believe, should be as easy as films to follow. Any less than that and I just get restless.

Does that mean that films that are based on books (for example: Harry Potter, Twilight, Lord of the Rings) should simply be the book on screen? No. Take the Harry Potter movies for example. I think I speak for the majority of people when I say that the Potter movies got better as they went on (disclaimer; I haven’t seen the 6th one) – but that was because the first and second were very true to the book- at the expense that they were only average movies. I think the new directors have realized this, and the later movies have steered away from the books, but are better stand-alone movies because of it. The best description of the later movies comes from my cousin:

“They’re grand movies if you don’t compare them to the books. They stand alone fine”

What do we think? Bear in mind I’m using Harry Potter only as an example.

10,000 tweets

100,000 page loads.

I’m planning a get-together in Dublin to celebrate these, more details as they emerge.

The images, marked with a “Photo owned by (cc)” come from a wonderful little site called Jazz Biscuit. You enter in a search term and it looks through Flickr images marked with some CC license (Creative Commons is an organization promoting the increase of sharing of images and improving collaboration). Their motto is Share, Remix, Reuse — Legally.

In a nutshell, the people who took these images have released them under a license – more often than not, it means you can use these images so long as you don’t profit from them and you attribute them properly (that’s the “Photo owned by (cc)”).

In my work for Irish Student Blogs (I’ll shut up about it soon, I swear!) I discovered a new website/tool for bloggers who want good, high-quality images to use on their website.

Enter, stage right, SXC. This requires a bit more work, and also requires you to sign up but I believe it worth it. Entering in a search term (my most recent one was ‘studying’) will bring you a huge list of incredibly large. (Some of them are 4000px by 3000px. For non-tech folks, that’s absolutely massive!) You can search without logging in, but to download the high resolution version of the image, you’ll need to be a member. You download the image to your desktop and then upload it through Flickr or WordPress and insert it into your post. It’d be nice to add a small note somewhere, maybe in the description, that you got the image from Jazz Biscuit or SXC. A simple ‘gotten from JB’ will do.

As I’ve been asked so much about where I get the images I insert into my post, I thought I’d answer all your questions about it and write a big long post about it. I’d really recommend the two websites because images are so crucial to blogs.

However, one word of advice, especially for personal bloggers: don’t make every image some stock photo from Jazz Biscuit or SXC.. people read personal blogs because they connect with the author. Adding your own images helps them connect with you :)