Sorry for the delay...

As you can tell from the date of the last post — 10 days ago — I haven't posted here for quite a while. There are two reasons:

1. I've been preoccupied with writing the first ever production script for my manga Spanner for Script Frenzy. I wrote a lot of pages and claimed my victory. You can read more about it on my project blog.
2. I thus haven't had much time to seriously think about my politically incorrect opinions or even about simply blogging.

But I'll make sure to post here more often. After all, I'm the kind of opinionated person who wants people to know where I stand.

[EDIT 12/28/2008: This post referred to another post now on my new opinion blog. I've kept this entry posted there too, despite deleting the "Learning to Blog" and other nonpolitical entries from it and the political entries from here, because, well, it's just as true there as it is here.]

Learning to Blog 5: Blogrolls, Part 2

As it turned out, adding blogs to my blogroll happens to be no more difficult than adding links to my link lists (and no less tedious, I might add). So I searched for a few blogs and added them. I even found a few blogs to add when looking to add links. No problem, really.

The first few blogs I added were ones I'd had in my web browsers' bookmark lists, or that were associated with some sites I'd had bookmarked, sometimes for years. Not all of them, but most. Others I pretty much never heard of and just found out about on my search. I'll do more of both in the near future as I build up my blogroll. I'll then do the same for my project blog, and repeat the process on any other blogs I set up anywhere else.

My first lesson in blogrolling was simply how to add one to my blogs. This turned out to be less trouble than I thought, especially once Google added a blogroll option directly to Blogger (or, more accurately, "Blogger in draft"). This takes care of the second lesson. Later, I'll need to learn how to use a blogroll managing service such as BlogRoll.com.

Of course, I still have a lot more to learn. I haven't reached the top of the learning curve yet...

Learning to Blog 5: Blogrolls, Part 1

It's been a while since I've even touched this blog (except to print personal copies of the entries). So I might as well revive this series I thought I'd abandon (and resume on a new blog). This time around, I'm going to build myself a blogroll. That means I'm going to have to take some time to look for blogs, including some of my old favorites, and put them in the blogroll I've already set up on this site.

If you read some blogs, they have long lists of other people's blogs. This is called, of course, a "blogroll". Sometimes a blogroll will have excerpts from the linked blogs' latest posts. Like the standard lists of links, a blogroll is another way of keeping yourself from being isolated. The trick, of course, is to get people to link to your blogs from theirs. That's one reason why I'm writing more than one entry on blogrolls alone.

On this particular blog of mine, I'm going to have more than just one blogroll; "Blogger in draft" permits it, just as you can have more than one link section. Since I still haven't learned enough to make even the tiniest impact or gain more than a few readers (including myself), I'll use this blog for learning until I get the necessary knowledge. Then I'll use it the way I intended it.

I'll take some time to build my blogrolls, and then I'll resume this series with part 2. I'm a bit busy with writing right now, however (here's my progress report for the middle of the month on my project blog), so I'll have to take some time off from writing after I build a comfortable cushion in my page count). Like I said, I'll have to take some time off from writing to search the Web for the blogs I want to link.

Continued in part 2...

Learning to Blog 4: Getting Serious

In the latest Blogger Buzz post, the Blogger people just informed us Blogger bloggers about the proposed upgrades to their service. They gave the link to the beta version, called "Blogger in draft". Lo and behold, I found what I'd been led to believe was missiong before:

• A blogroll.
• A search box.
• A convenient feed subscription option.

I decided to take advantage of those and add them to both my blogs. It's a good thing Google thought to add those important missing features, among others. After all, a company's got to keep competitive or die. My learning curve is now less steep.

This will be the last of my posts on learning how to blog. The big blogroll goose chase that I thought I would have to undertake simply disappeared, and with it the need for any more of these "Learning to Blog" entries. I'm still new to this, but I'll get the hang of it one of these days. The only challenge remaining is getting people to read The Outside View, my other blog Spanner's World, and whatever other site I'll be putting up in the future. After this, I'm getting back to the real reason I set up The Outside View: my views on the political and philosophical controversies of the day. From now on, I'm getting serious. Or however serious I get...