Two buck chuck is a very good thing.
So today marks the end of my first week as a blogger. Not quite sure how I feel about the whole thing, seeing as how the opportunity fell into my lap (or, to put it another way, was gift wrapped for me by S. after she put in quite a bit of time setting the whole thing up). But on this, the smallest of milestones, it seems appropriate to engage in a little reflection. After all, isn’t that what this whole enterprise is built around, introspective navel gazing?
I tend to treat most things I do on a regular basis as manufacturing problems. It’s a game for me: identify the desired product, track the necessary stages of production, look for efficiency producing changes, make those changes and, after a period of time, assess the outcome. So what are the lessons I’ve learned in only seven days of practice and what changes, if any, will I make?
The short answer is, not many. I’m satisfied maintaining a frequency of one post a day. That feels about right. I have, however, already instituted a change in how I go about preparing each post. I started out using the blogspot interface, typing my post in the form, uploading and then editing as required. The end result was that each entry, no matter how much editing I did, carried the time stamp from when I first initiated the process. This didn’t feel right. To me, the time stamp of an entry should indicate that no changes have been made since that point.
Trivial? Yes. A valid concern based on how much wine I’ve had to drink? Absolutely. So my new manufacturing technique is to adopt a three step process. The first step is to write out my entry in a word processing program (we all know which one I’m using, but I hate to advertise for the MSMonopoly), making full use of the spell check function and editing drafts as required. Next, I go through the potential entry and determine if linking to external pages would add value. If so, this leads to a Google-enabled digression. Finally, I paste the completed entry into the blogspot interface and upload immediately.
Of course, I could just manually adjust the time stamp instead. That, however, would take too much effort (if you can’t see the tongue in my cheek, it’s there). Now, I think there’s a bottle of wine that’s in need of emptying.
Salud!
PS. One final thought. If you ever happen to print out a document to edit and then forget to bring a pen with you on a smoke break, never fear. Simply delete any extra words by pressing the lit tip of a cigarette against the paper at the appropriate point. Just make sure to snuff out the burning segment with your fingers before the page bursts into flame. If you have to add words or rearrange sentences, well you're SOOL. You really should've brought that pen.
