Novice No Longer

Blog Introspection Challenge

13.) What have you learned from blogging?

 

That’s a broad question! I could either go the technical route or the more emotional/mental route. seeing as how the latter is ever-changing and I keep relearning things I thought I already knew, I’m going to focus on the former; the more boring of the two but the easiest to tie down. 

easy, you say? 

One of the first things I learned from blogging is what bandwidth is and why hotlinking is not always polite. when I first started this blog I wasn’t uploading the images I use to the blog’s storage area but using the url‘s from a picture-sharing-site instead. I wasn’t sure how much storage space I had on this blog or how quickly it would fill up, so by linking to the photos instead of uploading, I didn’t need to concern myself with the storage space. I soon found that the free account I had on the picture-sharing-site gave me a monthly allotment of bandwidth though, and if I ever went over that amount then all my pics would not be viewable until the allotment reset itself for the next month. ohhh, now I understand why some people bitch about hotlinking.

fe-fi-fo-feef, I smell a bandwidth thief!

some sites and blogs have unlimited bandwidth through their hosting company (as I do, now that I’ve switched most of my images back over here) , but others have a set amount that they can’t go over. so if I use the url from a pic on someone else’s site and post it on mine, then every time it gets viewed on my site I am eating up their bandwidth. not cool, if they have a limit or pay for their bandwidth.  it’s something that I didn’t really understand and took for granted before I started running my own blog. 

Another thing that I learned through blogging is that it’s really annoying when someone (me) inserts actions into their sentences repeatedly, like *laughs* or *blushes*. it’s fine to do sometimes but not constantly like I used to do; that’s what smileys are for! but then again, one can go overboard on the use of smileys too. be a responsible smileys user.

 

[“responsible” smiley doing laundry–what I should be doing right now…]

 

this reminds me of when I found a handy dandy list (oh shit, another Blues Clues reference!) of how to make the various smileys while browsing through the WordPress help section one day. I was so excited to finally know how others were accomplishing this! I may have made myself a little cheat sheet.

now I’m ready for any situation. bring it on!

Recently I’ve even dabbled in HTML code to better format my posts (the Matrix is real! ) when making a post, we have the option to use the visual editor- which essentially looks the same as it will appear in the finished post, or we can use the text editor- which shows the HTML for the post. every color, image placement, font, text size, alignment, etc. is part of a command that tells the computer how to display it. I’m sure it comes as second nature once you learn the language but I only know bits and pieces, so it’s slow going. it seems to use the same part of my brain that handles math, if that tells you anything.

Math= Temper Tantrum x Infinity

it’s all an ongoing process. there are things that I already knew before starting my own blog that I’ve learned how to do better, and there are things that I always wondered about but didn’t quite grasp. I’m constantly learning and improving what little skills I have in the techie department. it feels good to finally be able to follow computer conversations that my husband has with me, without catching flies in my mouth. and it feels great when I know something that he doesn’t!

me, basking in knowledge

note to self: do not trust Urban Dictionary to give reliable definitions