Category Archives: Meta-Blogging

Meta-Blogging

Bonus Post: Setting a Posting Schedule

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As readers may have noticed, I’ve started blogging more frequently again recently. In fact, I’ve tentatively set a schedule, which I decided I will formally announce:

I’m going to make every effort to post something new every Monday and Friday.1

Over the years, Ive read countless posts and watched countless videos extolling the importance of setting a regular schedule for you content. They all explain — and their arguments are impeccably logical and persuasive — how doing so sets expectations with your readers/viewers, enabling them to know when the should come back. They’ve even stressed that the frequency doesn’t matter nearly much as the regularity.

I think it also helps me when I set a schedule because it actually passes the releases of my posts. There are times when I feel extremely inspired and could shoot out a post every day or even several posts in a single day. Which is great until I drink my last bottle of the mead of inspiration. Then I have nothing to post for days or even weeks. I figure that by saving that flurry of posts and posting them over time, I can hopefully keep things going with a backlog when I find myself waiting for the delivery driver to bring me a new order of Kvasir’s blood.2

As always, I reserve the right to modify this schedule in the future. In fact, I’m already wondering if I might want to add a post every Wednesday as well. This is because I feel like I have a plethora of post ideas in my head and it’s going to take forever to get through them all posting just two times a week. But for now, I’m going to try this schedule for two to three weeks.

To further help myself, I’m setting a focus on the Friday posts. Currently, my plan is to blog about a journal prompt from Yvonne Aburrow’s book Changing Paths, though I’ve found at least one chapter where I may not use a journal prompt, but talk about some other aspect of the chapter I’m covering that week. Just yesterday, I blogged about a prompt from chapter two, and I have twelve more chapters (plus the experiences of individuals’ experiences that Yvonne collected and shred in part three) to go. After that, I’ll have to find a new focus for Friday posts.

Money will be “anything goes” day. This means that I’ll pot about anything that comes to mind. Granted, I suspect that most of those posts will regarding one of the things I’m interested in, knowledgeable about, and/or passionate about:

  • witchcraft and Paganism
  • religion and spirituality in general
  • thoughts about something I read (including extra Changing Paths posts)
  • sexuality and LGBTQIA+ issues
  • political issues
  • personal stories and memories
  • televisions shows, movies, and pop culture analysis

But I may go completely “off script” and post about something not on this list. For example, sometimes my computer geek side just needs to come out and play. But the above should hopefully set your expectations on what you will likely find here.

As always, I welcome feedback. For example, I will run out of chapters/prompts from Changing Paths, so if you have another book or other source of blog prompts/inspiration I might draw on for future Friday posts, I’d welcome that. And I’m always willing to write a Monday post in response to a question or topic suggestion, so feel free to leave those in the comments as well. Or if you’d feel more comfortable doing so, you can send them to me via my contact form.3

As a final note, you may note that the title of this post starts with “Bonus Post.” This is something else I’ve decided to do. If I decide to publish a post outside of the schedule, I’m going to mark it as a bonus post (I’ve even started a tag for it). I figure this will help people see them and give me a rough measure of how frequently I”m posting outside of my current schedule (and therefore whether I might need to modify the schedule).

Footnotes

  1. The joys of being a witch! Most normal people would just say “I’m going to make a new post every Monday and Friday. But as a witch who takes his word very seriously, I have to address that niggling part of me that asks, “But what if I say that and then don’t manage it?” Oy. ↩︎
  2. Okay, technically Kvasir’s blood is known as the mead of poetry, not the mead of inspiration. But I figure all things, including poetry, ultimately flow from the same source of inspiration. Call it personal gnosis, if you will. ↩︎
  3. Heck, it’d be a nice change of pace to check those emails and find one that isn’t from a spammer. ↩︎
Meta-Blogging, Personal Development

Musings on this blog and life in general

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This blog has been running on a self-hosted instance of the WordPress blogging software since I migrated over from the (also self-hosted) Movable Type software back in May of 2013. I’ve never regretted the decision to make the move and actually love WordPress. It’s handy, versatile, and easily-extended platform.

Though for the past few months, I’ve been having trouble with their JetPack plugin. The worst of the problems is that every now and then, when I do a plugin, the whole system would have to go down. Then I’d have to deactivate Jetpack and possibly even disconnect my blog from the WordPress.com site and then set it all back up.

Well, tonight, I managed to resolve those problems. it was pretty easy to fix in the long run. It was mainly a matter of contacting my hosting provider and having them enable another extension to PHP for my server. Then I also found out that my PHP configuration was limiting memory to a ridiculous number, which I was able to fix myself. And now, I have a happy blog that plays nice with JetPack again. Cool!

Of course, having spent the time to sort through that, I feel like I need and want to get back into blogging. That’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while, to be honest. After all, I felt really energized after writing blog posts participating in the #OcculTea conversation. Then again after appearing on The Mocha Widow’s podcast.

What I struggle with is how to keep up the steam. And if I’m being honest, I feel like this has been a recurring problem for me. I look back at the number of abandoned — and it feels like failed — projects I’ve started up:

I think the only thing I’ve been able to stick with has been microblogging at sites like Twitter (I will never call it “X”) and Threads. And that’s mostly because (1) it’s easy to come up with something that’s only a couple hundred characters long to say and (2) I’m often just silly there. A blog requires something longer and more serious. (As do many of the other mediums I’ve experimented with in the above list.)

Of course, I think another thing that helps me on those particular sites is the engagement. I almost always get some feedback on Twitter and Threads. But when it comes to my longer content, whether it be a blog or a YouTube video? Not so much. And that’s a bit discouraging. I won’t deny that or apologize for feeling that way.

However, it’s also more than that. Engagement energizes and inspires me. When I get feedback, it often makes me think of other things I want to say. When I don’t get such feedback, I often feel like I’m stumped wondering what else I actually have to say. The engagement keeps me thinking.

This is something I realized after doing the Interview with The Mocha Widow. i jokingly thought to myself that I’m a much better guest than a podcast host myself. Though maybe that was the mistake with my podcast. I wasn’t inviting guests on, but merely trying to fill the show with only my own thoughts.

In some ways, that’s also why I often miss diary communities like OpenDiary, which is where I got my blogging start (though we didn’t call it as such over there). We read each others diary entries and commented on them. And often we replied to comments on the other person’s own diary. We had whole conversations going there. (Weirdly, I feel like sites like LiveJournal and Tumblr have tried to recapture that community feel, but it just doesn’t seem the same to me.)

I’m not sure how many people really see this blog by comparison. It’s standalone. There aren’t diary circles I can submit posts to. There aren’t other bloggers on the site looking to join in. So part of the trick to get engagement hear is just to get people reading what I write here in the first place. And I’m not entirely sure how to do that anymore.

I also think I need to work on getting more inspiration by engaging in things myself. For example, I haven’t read many books on Paganism and witchcraft lately. I mean, it had probably been a full year before I borrowed a Kindle Unlimited copy of Essential Asatru last month. So I think getting back into some appropriate reading might help give me new things to talk about. Or maybe even just new perspectives on old things I’ve talked about before.

I do know I’ve been thinking I’d like to start reading some of the Pagan theology books I started looking up. So that may be a good place. Plus I have all the Icelandic sagas and other source materials for Norse/Germanic culture and religion that I still need to read. Maybe that will help get the creative juices flowing as well.

And as always, if you’re reading this, you are more than welcome to leave your thoughts and suggestions in the comments. After all, as I noted earlier, I thrive on engagement/feedback. So how about providing some nourishment for your friendly neighborhood wyrd-worker?

Meta-Blogging, Videos, Witchcraft

New Witchy YouTube Channel

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Image of the YouTube Banner for the channel.

Hello, readers! I’m back from a lengthy hiatus and I have a great announcement. I have decided to start a witchy YouTube channel.

Why I’m doing this

I originally considered starting a YouTube channel back when I started The Bed and the Blade podcast last summer. At the time, I felt like it would take too much time and effort.

But after looking at other witchy YouTube channels like Chaotic Witch Aunt and Hearth Witch, I decided I had too much to say on witchcraft and Pagan spirituality not to start a channel. Hence, A Wyrd-Worker’s Wisdom was conceived and, as of Sunday, born.

About the channel name

I chose the title, because in the Norse traditions, I see witchcraft as a sort of act of altering and laying out wyrd, and I felt that the use of the word “wyrd-working” would both uniquely identify me and pay homage to the primary context in which in which I work magic. I could’ve used “seithman” instead, but I liked the alliteration better.

How the new channel fits into my overall online presence

For any fans of the podcast, rest assured that I plan to bring that back as well and hope to work some sort of synergy between blog, podcast, and YouTube channel. The podcast will resume at it’s original pace of one episode a month, though I hope to do a YouTube video each week. In some ways, I’m finding it easier to produce videos than podcasts. Though I’m also finding that getting into video production is a (potentially) more expensive endeavor than a podcast, go figure.

Introducing the first video

Currently, I only have one video up. It’s about casting a circle. Check it out below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvQ42z40hk8]

As you might notice, I need to work on the video quality. I’m still learning how to properly use my lighting equipment (plus I have more lights coming) and I need to position things better so I can refer to my script without looking like I’m gazing off into nowhere. But the information itself is solid, I think. Let me know what you think!

Planning ahead

I’m still trying to work out a schedule for everything. Tentatively, I plan on having podcast episodes continue to come out the last Saturday of the month and releasing a new video every Tuesday. As for blog posts, I may scale them back and/or change what days I schedule them for.

Keep checking for more details as they are become available!

Memories, Meta-Blogging, Online Life

I Miss Diary Communities

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I got my start blogging over at OpenDiary.com. Of course, we didn’t call it blogging there. We called it writing in an online diary. But a lot of us tended to approach our online diaries like we were bloggers. A lot of us eventually created our own blogs somewhere else. Essentially, we had opinions and other thoughts we wanted to share with others, and we enjoyed getting feedback and starting dialogues over what we had to say.

To be honest, online diary sites, and especially OpenDiary, had features that made that a lot easier than it seems to be on more traditional blogs. Those sites were all about community and had tools and features that encouraged interaction between members in the community. There was the constantly updating “Recent Entries” list on the front page that let you know at a glance what your fellow online diarists had said recently. Then there were friend lists where you got a notification when one of your friends posted a new entry. There was also the Reader’s Choice, which was a small listing of people that a certain number of community members thought were worth reading. It was an interesting feature that had all the merits and problems that you’d expect from a system that promoted content based on popular vote, but it was still a way to promote content and encourage interaction.

My favorite feature was Diary Circles, which were pages dedicated to specific topics. When you wrote an entry, you could submit it to be listed in up to three different relevant circles. (It had to be relevant. People who submitted their angel food cake recipe to the Sports circle were shot down pretty fast.) That way, people who were interested in that particular topic could see and read your entry.

All of these things drove dialogue and debate. For the Religion and Spirituality circle — one of my favorite haunts — there was probably more of the latter than the former. Though I did forge some amazing friendships and there was a group of us that loved talking and exploring things together. That group consisted of atheists, Christians, Pagans, and Hindus. Our discussions were fascinating and amazing.

For various reasons, we all left OpenDiary for another site. Eventually we left that site for reasons that motivate me to not even name it. I moved to this site, though I also dabbled with blogs over on Blogger.com. and LiveJournal Other friends moved to LiveJournal, Blogger, Typepad, WordPress.com, or Blogger.com. Some of us are still blogging, though sometimes sporadically. I can’t speak for the others, but I still miss the online diary sites.

Running my own blog on my own hosted site means I don’t get all those fancy community-building features that encourage the same level of interaction and dialogue. It shows in my lack of comments — though there are also things I could probably do to fix that. And even a lot of the sites dedicated to helping you set up a blog seem to suffer. Sure, LiveJournal has LJ Communities and WordPress.Com has search tools to find other hosted blogs with similar interests. But it’s still not the same.

Some days, I would just kill for a Diary Circle or Editor’s Choice feature or one of those other gems that online diary sites were (and presumably are) so good at providing.

So, dear readers, are any of you bloggers or former bloggers? Have you migrated your blogging over the years? Does your current host offer features you didn’t have when you were hosted elsewhere? Or have you lost features you now miss due to a move? In general, how has your blogging experience changed and/or remained the same as time went by?

Meta-Blogging

And we’re back!

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Some of my regular readers (I have a few of those, right?) may have notice my site has been down for the last couple of days. That’s because my hosting provider detected that my WP installation had been infected with malware and shut my site down until I could get it fixed. So I spent a little time waiting for them to provide a list of files that were infected, dutifully replaced or removed (most of them weren’t even needed by WP, which was weird) them, then waited for them to verify that everything was clean so they could bring my site back online. Unfortunately, that translated into two days because…well, you know what it’s like communicating with customer service. Don’t misunderstand me, my hosting provider’s customer service agents are friendly and extremely helpful. But the response times can be a bit slow.

I’m not sure why my site got infected with malware. Was it just a random occurrence? Is someone out there gunning for me in particular? Maybe I pissed off some hacker with a huge crush on Grindr who took issue with my last blog post. Who can say? But the important thing is that everything should all be better now. As a bonus, I also added a monitoring plan to the site. Now the monitoring software should detect and remove malware automatically, rather than leaving it to the hosting provider to discover and lock everything down. Here’s to hoping!

Meta-Blogging

This is either a statement of why I love WordPress or a Staple’s Commercial

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That was easy.

About half an hour, I logged into my dashboard for this blog and got a notice that there was a newer version of WordPress available.  I’ve been keeping my plugins up to date since converting to WordPress last month, so I figured I’d do the same with the blog software itself.  I figured it was probably easy enough to do.

I’m sure the folks WordPress could find a way to make the upgrade process even easier.  I’m just not sure how they would.  The actual upgrade process took less than thirty seconds, and two of those seconds involved me clicking a button on my Update page in the dashboard.  That was all that was required of me.

The full process took between ten and thirty minutes because I followed the recommendation of backing up the blog’s database and the files on the site first.  Even that was pretty easy.  I couldn’t remember how to do a MySQL backup.  Fortunately, the folks at WordPress were kind enough to include a link to thorough and easy to follow (though I think some of their screenshots may be for older versions of VDeck and myPHPAdmin) instructions on how to do just that.  Then backing up the files was a simple matter of logging into my server with Filezilla and pulling the entire directory structure over to my computer.  (That’s why i don’t know how long the process actually took.  Once I started the transfer, I swapped windows and did other things.  When I came back, Filezilla was idling and waiting for me to tell it what to do next.)

Back when I used Movable Type, I upgraded the software a couple times.  It wasn’t nearly as pleasant.  I had to go searching for backup instructions.  I had to download the software myself, then move it to my server. Then I had to initiate a database update process from an included upgrade script.  The last time I tried to upgrade Movable Type, it’s that last step that failed.  The upgrade script kept locking up on me.

If future updates with WordPress continue to go as smoothly as this one did, it’s just one more reason I’ll be glad I made the switch.

Meta-Blogging

Heads up!

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This is just a note to let you know that the blog may become inaccessible for a while this weekend.  I have finally decided to migrate the blog from MovableType to WordPress.  This will hopefully address a few problems:

1.  It will hopefully get rid of a lot of the spambots that constantly (thousands of times per day) hit my commenting script.
2.  It will hopefully resolve some of the issues people have trying to comment here.
3.  It will let me get some newer features, as I’m running a pretty old version of MovableType and attempts to upgrade to newer versions have failed abysmally in the future.
4.  I’ll be able to leave pingbacks on WordPress blogs I link to.
5.  I’ve used WordPress and decided I just like it better.  (Okay, not really a problem, but hey.)

I’ve been hesitant to do this, but I discovered there’s a new site out there called tp2wp.com that streamlines the migration process.  And while it costs $50, I figure that resolving the above issue is worth it.

To support this, I will be disabling all comments and trackbacks on this blog in a few minutes (relative to this blog’s posting time) to “freeze” the database.

From your standpoint, the way this plays out should look like this:
1.  You may see the blog as it currently is, but will be unable to comment.
2.  You may then see nothing.  Or a blank blog.
3.  You will (hopefully) eventually see this blog, but with a different cosmetic appearance.  Hopefully, there will be a brief post from me announcing that the migration was a complete success and it’s back to business as usual.

As an aside, I will be doing a full backup of the site’s static pages and other files (e.g. images).  If something goes horribly wrong (or I just get frustrated before I work through the dozens of minor gotchas the migration site forgot to mention), I should be able to restore the MT version of this blog.  In that case, rather than step #3 above, expect to see a blog post from me muttering and cussing.

At any rate, wish me luck and I’ll hopefully catch you on the flip side!

Meta-Blogging, Randomness

A shoutout to Christopher Yuan’s followers and friends

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Starting sometime last night, my blog started getting a lot of hits.  By “a lot,” I mean more than three times its normal hits in a day.  I also started noticing that a lot of the traffic was coming from Facebook and Twitter.  So doing a bit of research, I discovered that Christopher Yuan, co-author or “Out of a Far Country,” tweeted a link to the first post I wrote reviewing that book and posted the same link to his Facebook page.

Honest review of ?#OutofaFarCountry? from a gay man who’s a self-proclaimed witch! – http://yuan2.us/29

I’ll be a bit honest, I’m a but curious and concerned why he felt it was necessary or appropriate to bring up the fact that I’m a witch, but I’m still thankful that he promoted my review (and I hope many of his readers read all the posts on the topic, not just the first and “flattering” post he linked to).  After all, as one of his own commenters on Facebook said, “any press is good press.”

So to Christopher, I say thank you.  To those of you who found my blog through Christopher, I say welcome.  I hope you find what I wrote informative and thought-provoking, even if you don’t agree with me.  And I hope you’ll stick around to read some of the other stuff I’ve written.

I plan on doing one last follow-up post on Christopher’s and his mother’s book, which I hope to have up later today.  It’s something that caught my eye in one of the final chapters, and I want to talk about it.

Emotions, Meta-Blogging, Writing

Still alive and sharing a link

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Hello all!

Man, I’ve been silent for months now.  In some ways, it’s a shame that I’ve allowed this blog to remain untouched after spending November and December working so hard to get a regular schedule going.  But alas, I felt it was necessary.  Trying to keep it going through January — when I was completely unmotivated due to memories bringing up personal emotional issues (I’m fine now, thanks for asking) would have been disastrous, I feel.  At that point, keeping the blog going started to feel like an obligation of drudgery rather than something of I enjoy.  So rather than totally kill my own love for my blog, I decided to take a break.

I hope to pick this blog back up again, so I appreciate anyone who is willing to keep it in their newsreaders or on their blogrolls.  I won’t make any promises of when or how frequently I will return right now, as my attentions have also been focused elsewhere.  During my absence here, I started a new blogging project, which I’m really getting into.  Unfortunately, due to the nature of that project, I’m required to do it under anonymity.  That means that I am unable to let you all know where or how to find it.  Sorry.

I’m also trying to get back into writing more, which means my Writing.Com portfolio is slowly starting to see some action.  (My apologies to the prudes and those just not interested in male-to-male sex, but most of the stuff I’m working on right now is sexual/erotic fiction.)  I also just updated my writing-specific blog over there with an entry about one advantage visual media has over the written word.  I encourage you to check it out, though I warn you that it relies heavily on spoilers to the movie The Sitter.

I hope you all are well. Drop me a comment and let me know what’s new with you.