Meta

This is a meta blog post. Meta is a word found in various contexts, and probably a lot of people know the word but not its meaning. For instance webmasters know meta-tags, scientists know meta-analysis, Q&A pages as stackoverflow and serverfault know meta-cafe. And I decided it was time, again, for a meta blog.

Meta
To quote Wikipedia: "a prefix used in English (and other Greek-owing languages) to indicate a concept which is an abstraction from another concept, used to complete or add to the latter". I'd say: meta-blah is blah about/concerning blah. This meta blog post therefore, is a blog post about blogging itself. 


Actually, the above text can be seen as meta-meta, because it concerns blogging about blogging about blogging. Right!


Anyhow
Anyhow, I learned today that when you add a picture to your post in Blogger, and do so by entering an url, you're actually hotlinking the image. You tell  the browser, when your blog is displayed, to go and get the image (and nothing but the image) from someone else's website. Sometimes this is okay. Often it is not. Sorry I did it. I fixed it. Sidenote: when the other side changes the content of the image (but keeps the exact same url), then that is what is displayed to the user. This can be really awkward if your are a newspaper, hotlink an image and this image is replaced by the owner for something that is not to be seen by innocent eyes. It happens.


Visitors
Since last week, my blog is actually visited now or then. The pingywebedition post has been in the top 10 results of Google, which generated a bit of traffic (it's just a few hits a day, but I still get excited from every peak in the statistics section :-). But the most traffic comes from other blogs, where I left a comment or that link to my blog after I linked to theirs. 


This whole process starts to become a learningful experience. I submitted my blog to Bing and some ping sites. This might seem contradicting to what I blogged earlier, but I just want to get an idea of what works and what doesn't. 


Content
More important of course is the site / blog itself. The content. I stumbled upon the Blog Building University. It contains a lot of free content concerning the art of blogging. It even offers a email e-course.  At first glance the site seems to be a nice mix of easy cliche's and some interesting ideas. The level of English, to my opinion, is moderate at most. 


The one thing that stands out every time I think about this blogging adventure is this: what is the plan? Or actually, what will be the plan? One of the ideas I have is to start a second blog as a side project, more focused / dedicated perhaps to a niche even, and keep this one to discuss the progress of this sideproject, as well as everything else.


A blogpost a day
I'm still on schedule. This post is actually already for tomorrow. Because then I won't be able to post anything. It is however, wearing me out a little bit. I blog mostly at the very end of the day and it always takes more time than I plan. Luckily, i have two weeks off starting this Friday. Nice!