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Automattic, Blog, Budva, Kate Upton, Montenegro, Publishers, Tools, WordPress
It’s my 1st Anniversary on WordPress! Party time! It’s been an amazing year and i loved every moment of it… Hold on, that’s not the whole truth. It’s more honest to say: i loved almost every moment of it! I couldn’t sleep AT ALL the night after my my very first WordPress post, i was excited, i was anxious, i was thrilled!
Oh, and i was such a techno-dummy back then! Not that i am a wizard now, but i had spent months googling mysterious terms such as WIDGET, trying to figure out how to insert pictures, links and just about anything else. And it took me MONTHS to get it what a pingback was!
Then the sweating over copy-right; I had emailed every single publisher whose decks i posted here, waited for an official reply from them – and for written authorization to use images of their copyrighted artwork. I am still strict with copy-right of anything i use in my posts, the thing is that publishers are fine with images of up to six cards from any deck being posted, as long as the copyright notice is there, there is no need to send them official inquiries and insist on getting a written authorization.
All of it can get quite overbearing in the beginning, i think the first month or so i was logged in almost all of my waken time, trying to figure out plugins, themes and other WordPress wonders.
Funnily, writing per se took the least of my time. There is a brief notice i posted at About this blog on why, being a published writer, i switched to blogosphere – mind you, i partially blame the funny evolution of-social networking for that!
It took me a lot of courage to start posting my own photographs, i was taken aback and felt humbled that those were liked! In the art of photography i am an absolute dilettante, i know nothing about it – i simply capture some special to me moments with automatic camera and later on retouch them a bit digitally, that’s it. The thing is that through these enthusiastic efforts here on WordPress i got to know some great artists whose work i love.
WordPress is a world unto itself, and it’s a safe, creative and supportive one. I have dabbled on phenomena of blogosphere before, in Pirate’s Heart &The Copper Sun.
It’s doable and you can make it, even if English is not your first language, and even if you write in it while living in one of those tiny European countries which most have problems pinpointing on the map.
Still, most of the advice on blogging is quite useless, what worked for some won’t work for others and there is no formula for success… Except the usual: do what you love, make it as relevant to others as you can, make it positive, at least in the potential – even the darkest of it.
I am all for quality, i don’t see a point in flooding other bloggers’ readers and I must confess that i am the first to unsubscribe from folks who overdo it.
I love Truth and Cake and i think Rian’s advice on how to start a blog and how to keep it going is about the best you can get.
I’d add only one thing: please don’t start your blog entries with WOW and AWW, it’s such a turn off! A great post on use of REALLY, LIKE & other simulacra by an adjunct professor of English was recently Freshly Pressed, if you are still tempted to use I MEAN, WHATEVER & GEEZ in your writing, please, do take the time to read it.
To my amazement, the rant i had written about Slavoj Zizek became the most popular piece I’ve posted; funnily, second to it is the entry mentioning Kate Upton’s cellulite.
The statistics are downright breath-taking, in a year of blogging more people had read my writings than over in a decade of traditional publishing:
The blog is featured at Portal Montenegrina, the main online cultural gate to my country, sponsored among else by U.S. Embassy in Montenegro and Government of Montenegro.
Meanwhile, in my native Montenegro, I published a collection of poems. Devil, an unauthorized biography was promoted at last Winter’s Book fair and at one of the main regional art&literature festivals held in the summer at the coastal city of Budva.
Other than that, in 2012 I’ve completed second year of the doctoral program at Pushkin University in Moscow; I’ve been to Brussels at the conference on author’s rights, chaired a session at the European Parliament, traveled to Hungary to attend P.E.N. congress, took some cool shoots of Pest and wrote a poem.
Not too bad, now that i think of it. 😉
