Increasing My Online Presence, Even Despite Myself

Sometimes you can increase your presence on the Internet even despite yourself, just doing a little thing that leads to another. In this case, I found myself with a new blog I had to figure out what to do with. Except that the figuring was already done for me, by a previous plan. So I stole from my own plan. The plan? It was for an art blog. Not one on my own Spanner-related stuff (like my existing project blog), but on art in general, and not just mine. And so here — this "Dennis Jernberg's _______" naming thing is starting to get a bit tedious — is my new art blog. [Note: there was a link to my Yahoo 360 blog, but Y!360 is now dead, alas...]

So what kind of stuff will I be writing about there? Any of my non-Spanner-related art, of course. (There's hardly any of it right now, but one can always hope.) Also, there's commentary on art news, and my hometown art scene. And I'll write about any art, period, as long as it interests me.

So there. I have yet another blog now. If this keeps up, I may end up needing something on the order of Blog-Zilla just to keep up with them all...

More Maintenance, and a New Photo Blog for Project 365

Tonight, my muse took her sweet time to give me new story ideas for my novel Bad Company, so I went back to the Net, sent my brother some photos, and proceeded to set up a Flickr account and a photo blog, both for Project 365 — and so I'm retiring the photo thread in this blog, just one day after I started it.

Why Flickr when I already have an account with Picasa Web Albums? Because Flickr has a Project 365 group, which I proceeded to join once I uploaded my first photos. This, of course, is the perfect excuse for me to actually use my camera...

Meanwhile, there's some kind of glitch in the template for my opinion blog that I'll have to take care of soon.

I've had an ambitious plan for increasing my Web presence for some time now. But all of a sudden, I find myself carrying it out almost without effort. In a single day, I set up my Flickr account and Photoblog blog. Then tonight I did some more maintenance work on my blogs, replacing the "Links to My Sites" section with a new, improved one. It looks like I'll be setting up my project webpage, and maybe even a LiveJournal account, by the time I post the next entry here. Who knows what else I might end up doing this month...

Blog Maintenance: January 2009

Finally, after, say, about 6 months and the creation of an entirely new blog, I decided to do some work maintaining the blogs themselves. I added various "Gadget" features to the sidebars. I also finished the task of switching the links and blogroll from this blog to my opinion blog. That was just the beginning.

To my project blog, notice that I've added a slideshow of the Spanner album at Picasa Web Albums, Google's counterpart to Flickr. Meanwhile, I've entered Project 365, in which you take a photograph a day for a year; the thread on this blog is here. While posting a comment to the NaNoWriMo forums, I realized that I can do the same thing with drawings, posting them to my project blog just like I'm posting my Project 365 photos to this blog.

Now comes the hard part. That means the long tedious task of searching for sites to add to my link lists and blogrolls. For one thing, I need to find the right webpages and blogs for each of my blogs to link to. Furthermore, there's a very annoying bug in the template of my opinion blog that makes some of the posts almost unreadable; I need to fix that bug soon.

With my websites and a few other sites in the future, I have my work cut out for me...

My Agenda for the First Week of January 2009

I have something of an ambitious agenda for the first week of 2009. First of all, I intend to write a whole lot. More information on that in the project blog (right here, to be exact). Once the first 30,000 words are out of the way, I intend to retool all three of my blogs, set up at least one new account (where, I'll say later), and start the initial work on my new homepage and project website.

What do I plan to do this New Year's weekend? Besides writing Bad Company, I want to get my blogs reorganized and properly customized. The political links that are still on this blog, I'll move to my opinion blog (which I also want to find the best name for), and I'll find other links I think better complement this particular blog. I'll make major changes in the blogrolls for each blog. I'll do the rest of the customization that got left behind when I abandoned my blogs back when I burned out on writing in August. I'll probably even change my template for this blog, and maybe even the project blog as well.

The other Web-related project I have in the works this weekend is my new project website. It will have the same name as my project blog — Spanner's World — and the project blog will be the associated blog. Eventually, I may even set up a "Spanner's World" forum for my projects, opening them up to public comment. The project page will be for my projects, of course, within the fictional universe that centers on my manga project Spanner and such side projects as Bad Company and its sequel Black Science.

So that's my plan for the first week of 2009. Now all I have to do is to keep myself to it...

Project 365 #1: A White New Year's

 

My first picture for Project 365: a snowy New Year's near Seattle.

I wanted to take part in the "Project 365" thing, in which you take a picture a day for a year. Then, around noon, when I started writing my 2007 NaNoWriMo novel Bad Company again, this time for JanNoWriMo, I looked outside the nearest window and found snow on the ground. It had snowed overnight! We not only had a white Christmas in the Seattle area this year, but a white New Year's. So I took this picture, and my Project 365 began!

And so it begins...