Do you ever have a bunch of blog post ideas bouncing around in your head but no idea where to start, what would actually be interesting, or how to flesh them out? That's been me lately.
My vision is improving, but my eyes aren't fully healed. My right eye, the first to be operated on, just hit the one-month mark. The left is about two weeks behind. I have one more doctor visit to get a prescription for reading glasses and maybe fine-tune my distance vision. Distance seems okay, but reading and intermediate vision are tricky. The intermediate could use some fine tuning, and my short-distance vision is definitely worse and needs more correction. With this better vision, I'm trying to blog more, get more done, and make progress before the next hurdle.
Catching up feels overwhelming. I keep trying to do five things at once, so I need to slow down and focus. On top of everything else, I have a backlog of podcasts to listen to or watch and a pile of unread items in my RSS reader. I'm slowly whittling the list down.
I'm trying a new program called Wispr Flow to compose this post and see how it works. I've always wondered if composing this way, using my voice, would be easier than typing and then refining. I'll give it a shot for a little while and see if it helps me focus. If it goes well, I might use it more for quick drafts.
A thoughtful couple contemplates the evolving intersection of creativity and technology, symbolized by a brain merging artistic tools with digital circuitry under a spotlight.
Last year, I wrote a post about using featured images called To Feature Image or Not. That post surprised me by getting a couple of responses. I usually get almost no feedback, so the email replies were unexpected.
The readers who responded basically said the same thing: It is your blog. You can use featured images if you want.
I saw Mike's post in my timeline, and it's referenced above. While I know some people hate AI with a passion, I agree that AI content has, for the most part, made the internet harder to enjoy. I agree with his post wholeheartedly, and maybe it will bring blogs – and hearing from people on blogs – back into the spotlight.
There was a time when most blogs looked quaint and personal, reflecting the owner's personality not only in their words but in the site's visuals. I also agree with Dave Winer's views on blogs, though not the idea of leaving everything completely unedited. If by “unedited” he means honest, uncensored feelings, I'm fine with that. But I do think having an AI or another human proofread your work is usually a good idea.
When I read some of my earlier posts from my youth – about 35 years ago when I was in my mid-twenties – I often think, what did I even mean there? It may make no sense now, and when I see something like that I cringe and immediately do some blog gardening and fix it. I don't want an AI to turn everything into perfect polish, but I do want my writing to make sense. Sometimes I ramble and chase rabbits the way I do in conversation, and that can lose readers' attention. I hate walking away from someone and thinking, what were we even talking about? That was all over the place.
So yes blogs look like they are coming back and that is a good thing in my opinion, and Google if you are listening, Blogger will be 30 years old in a few years. How about doing some updates to it, but keep it conservative and non-AI related and keep the spirit of it alive and just bring it forward into the modern age.
