It’s Been Fifteen Years

Earlier on I received this notification from WordPress :

15 Year Anniversary Achievement. Happy Anniversary with WordPress.com! You registered on WordPress.com 15 years ago. Thanks for flying with us. Keep up the good blogging.

And that ‘s accompanied by the familiar logo of WordPress. 15 years and I have about 5,451 blog followers and 796,589 stats in all of my five blogs. The four ones are updated occasionally though. My main focus is on DREAMS AND ESCAPES. If I were to add up my blog posts in all five, that’ll be close to 5,000.

Before WordPress, I started with Friendster then moved to Multiply back in 2007. Between these three platforms, I loved Multiply best, I had a premium account there with my youngest brother Noel paying $20 a month to maintain it. I was able to upload several of my favourite CD albums and photos all in high-res. Except for a few posts on our road trips and some poems, I did mostly political blog posts at the time when Gloria Arroyo was president. Since I cannot reblog them at WordPress, I started with one lone poem 15 years ago. Friendster and Multiply have closed years ago. And since I didn’t know how to customize my new site, it took me more than a year to add something. I learned to navigate, choose a theme, upload photos and customize eventually. I chose a theme which I am still using on my main blog until now. I love its clear lines and the easy way I could update it. WordPress has been changing its algorithms over the years and I have to adjust and learn more.

15 years writing at WordPress and through the years I met several blogging friends worldwide. The earlier ones have come and gone but there are several who remain loyal to my blog, regularly liking and commenting on my posts. I love the exchange of ideas and we have become a community of bloggers.

15 year and I’m still writing.

Advertisement

Read Full Post »

Tuesday Comes

6:30 am is still dark and cold. It ‘s only Noki who is outside in the garden. Waiting for the water to boil for my morning fix of either coffee or tea. I don ‘t use sugar anymore with my morning cup of coffee, I use a small packet of green Stevia instead. Just perfect for two pieces of rich tea biscuits. I wanna learn to drink coffee without sweetening it. Nissa says it is easy to adjust.

I blogged about my Insulin plant a couple of days ago and posted a photo at my garden blog. Would you believe, it produced two more flowers and another is about to show its face. For three consecutive days now, I eat the leaves raw. Just need to wash it well. I don’t even use fertilizer, chemical or otherwise so it is safe to eat fresh. Some people boil the leaves for tea. I haven’t tried it yet.

Saw some previous posts years ago that were visited by some viewers. I clicked the comments button and there appeared my online friends here on WordPress who have stopped blogging, many as long as three or two years ago. They have vanished and simply stopped blogging.

I agree that creating content is hard enough especially when you haven’t written anything for a long time. Although you have lots to write about, you don’t know how to start. That happens to me most of the time when I am hooked reading and blogging goes to the back seat. Now that I am blogging every day, it is somehow easier to write.

Read Full Post »

Following Your Followers

I started following some of my followers. Maybe some of them regularly read my blog because they always click “like”. Sometimes it doesn’t mean that clicking “like ” is tantamount to really liking a post or reading it till the end. I am grateful to all of you, much more when you engage and let me read your comments.

There are a few who follow you and in turn they wanted you to follow them back. I always make it a point to read some posts first before I decide to follow one particular blogger. It is not necessary for me that they have thousands of followers. Even if they are new in the blogosphere as long as I can relate to their blog contents, I follow them. Of course it would be nice that you follow and have followers from all over because you also learn in the process – their way of life, the way they look at things, their beliefs and everything else in between. I like reading about blogging, gardening, books, poems, pets, photography, families, books and book reviews, simple way of lives, places I only see here but now not so much about music because I could not understand and hear it well. Hopefully someday, my normal sense of hearing will be back.

Do you always follow back those bloggers who follow you?

Read Full Post »

Blogging Still

Just like on Facebook in which I cleared my list of friends lately, I’ve done the same thing to those blogs I follow online. As I have said before, it is not the number of followers that counts or the number of blogs you follow, I’m more appreciative of the content.

On Facebook when I posted that I narrowed down my list of friends, most of them asked, Am I still in? The mere fact that you could see my updates means you are in the loop…still.

I understand that some bloggers may not always have the time to compose a post, they might just be busy with life itself. But when it takes years that they are not blogging, they might have abandoned their blogs.

I visit DISCOVER from time to time looking for blogs quite similar to mine and believe me, there are hundreds. I do relate with some – blogging about life in general, family life in particular, those who love gardening, reading and those whose blogs describe the places where they are blogging from (I learn that way). I also love cooking segments and how well presented their recipes are. Photography is one thing so interesting in a blog, the way a blogger shows a particular place or object arresting to my eyes. Never mind if it is just a long empty road but speaks volumes to the reader. Poems too, yes! Although I don’t indulge in it more often, I love reading poems too. Dogs, I love those who share the lives of their lovable dogs. We have six doggies outside, a Shih Tzu and a Shih Poo inside the house. The last two share a room with Jovy and Josef, an air conditioned room at that.

Are you still active in the blogging world?

Read Full Post »

Missing The Numbers

I did a draft of this yesterday because for two days, we didn’t have internet connection. Maintenance again.

I feel so lazy to update my account here. It’s not like before. I saw my stats lately and it has dropped tremendously. Some of my blogger friends probably lost interest in reading my blog. Maybe my content is no longer that interesting.

Anyway, this pandemic gave me an opportunity to read, read and read like crazy. Since I’ve finished my Goodreads’ Reading Challenge for 2021, I’ve chosen some light reading from my e-book collection. I’ve forgotten how good romance books are sometimes. For the first time in years, I cried over a book. Think the like of movie adaptation of The Fault in our Stars by John Green, The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks and several books by Richard Paul Evans made into films. This year, I am done with memoirs, cookbooks, thrillers and historical novels. I am presently reading a paranormal story. Trying another genre has that “kilig” factor. I am on my 108th read. So far, so good.

Read Full Post »

Blogging Woes

I am having an intermittent headache. Been taking pain reliever for two days now. It has stopped a few minutes ago.

I was trying to read some of my earlier posts back in 2011 when I joined WordPress’ Post A Day Challenge. How I was able to blog every day back then was such a big puzzle to me. The endurance of thinking of what to write about every day without fail. I wonder where my badge got to, it was lost somewhere when I tried to change my blog format. Those were the times I got so many visitors although commenting and liking was unheard of. There were words of encouragement though from WordPress, inspiring words at the end of each entry and the total number of posts you have written since you started blogging. They got lost somewhere along the way. There are so many bloggers now. There are new ones who post a few entries and then suddenly stop writing. Some maybe disappointed by the slow rise of followers and readers.

No matter how good your contents are if your tags and categories are not, you can’t expect people to follow you right away. You build your blog slowly. It always takes a number of years before you can be recognized as a seasoned blogger. There are followers who never take time to even like your posts. Some are there who are bold enough to say that we should follow their blogs too. You don ‘t need to tell me that I should follow you back because if I like what you write about, I will follow it.

I wonder why I could no longer see my dashboard since I started using my tab. It always shows that I have to log in but when I do, it reverts back to the same log in option.

As I have always said, blogging has become a way of life.

Read Full Post »

When Do You Follow Other Blogs?

I just wrote my  2,525th post a while ago. From time to time, I visit my dashboard  and clean spam comments which are filtered by Akismet (just so blessed Akismet is here to classify those unwanted comments in our blogs).

How do you find bloggers that you follow aside from those who follow your blogs?  Some are followers of our blogger friends who probably read our exchange of comments and decided to visit and read a few lines. Some probably appeared at the bottom of your post because they had posted similar subject like you did. Anyway, no matter how you found them, aren’t you glad that you did? Lately, I visited and thanked those who followed my blog the past few days, reading some post and comments and liking those that are wonderfully written.  Sometimes, I return the favor and follow back.

Are you that kind of blogger who looks for seasoned writers with thousands of followers and statistics in their blogs?  Or do you take a chance on those blogs  with not even a hundred followers  but their writings are interesting and they have lovely contents? I am one of the latter I guess. Photo journals are lovely, blogging about farm life is interesting too but I love garden blogs. I love those flowers which normally don’t grow in tropical countries like ours. I love blogs about family and faith.  I am mesmerized by those photo blogs featuring countries like Italy, France and some exotic places in Asia.  I’ve found memoirs featuring these countries and read them with gusto.

Just received a comment from a blogger promoting a product.  And this was approved by WordPress because it was nicely worded. Sorry, I am not into it.

Blogging about blogging, anyone?

 

 

 

Read Full Post »

Understanding File Sizes

Oh no, I only have 30% left on my allowed free space for WordPress before this blog says goodbye.  I don’t intend to update it into a premium account then have to pay it yearly  just like I did with Multiply before. It is a personal blog and I don’t intend to use it to earn something extra. I remember attending a forum (paid at that with a bloody sum of P5,000.00 pesos) promising to teach online marketing, learning about SEO, finding your niche and such but then after the event, I realized it is not for me. I’d rather be the author, the blogger, the editor and publisher of my own posts than linking them to some other sites  that pay a minimal sum when readers click the sponsored ads on your post.

I have a free allowed space of 3,072 MB total since I am using a free theme. Most of us I think have the same limits.  I have used up 2,135.46 MB roughly 70% or a total of 936.54 MB remaining. How big is too big or how small is too small? Would I need to crop my pictures or post them  in a lower resolution format? Or would completely ignore posting photos because they eat up more space compared to just pure text? I wonder how many more blog posts I would have to write before this goes kaput. These are the computer storage units that we use like any other kind of measurement, kilo, mega, giga and tera.

• 1 B = 1 byte;
• 1 kB = 1000 bytes;
• 1 MB = 1000 kB;
• 1 GB = 1000 MB or 1 000 000 000 bytes

A 500-word blog entry is roughly 3,000 bytes so you can deduce from there how many more entries would fit into my remaining free space. Who knows, maybe in the coming days, I would not be able to find something interesting to blog about or maybe in the coming days, no one would visit my blog anymore because they are fed-up with what I am sharing here or maybe in the coming days, I have created a new site for my thoughts (I have actually started one but haven’t updated it yet).

Why am I worrying? I could still follow all those wonderful blogs that I regularly read, like and comment on. Just a word for new bloggers, resize or scale down all those hi-res photos before you upload and click publish unless yours is a photography blog and you need to show the minute detail of each post.

Happy blogging everyone 🙂

Read Full Post »