Recently, I’ve been working to make my blog more
interesting and easier to navigate. I
added a Blogroll (called Blogs I’m Following), and added her blog to the list. Jane Lindskold seems to write two types of
entries: 1) What’s happening in her life, and 2) A discussion with her friend
Alan. I’ve particularly enjoyed their
recent comparison of the educational systems in the United States and England. They’ve illuminated aspects
mentioned in TV series like “Inspector Morse” and “Yes, Prime Minister” that
I’ve always wondered about, but never got around to actually investigating.
In her email, Jane Lindskold also mentioned her desire to
organize her posts by specific topics.
Of course, a published author faces more deadlines and duties than an
unpublished one, and such organizing would impinge on the time she had available for blogging.
Since I began blogging, I’ve wrestled with how to focus on writing one particular type of blog post. But I
seem utterly incapable of specializing. My
initial idea to write about the Science Fiction and Fantasy literature
I loved evolved into a series on Star Trek, and then into nongenre TV shows and my trip to England. Pretty soon I was writing about
spirituality, the struggles I faced in writing my novel, James
Herriot, and even the ordeal of installing my microwave.
Blogging on so many topics means that readers who visit my
blog for one type of post have a hard time following what interests them
most. So for a long time, I’ve wanted to
develop a series of pages that readers could use to pursue posts on the
subjects that most interested them. But
I didn’t know how to set them up. I read
books on blogging, the instructions from Blogger, and anything I could
find on the Internet. Nowhere did I find
the subject explained in terms I could understand. The Blogger Layout section of my blog claimed that
“Pages” had been enabled, but I couldn't see them.
I’ve always belonged to the camp of “Look before you
leap.” Unfortunately, sometimes I spend so much
time looking that I don’t get around to leaping. It’s easier to focus on the tasks I can see
than to leap onto the unseen path. But
one day I decided to leap in and investigate the Pages section. If it did something weird to my blog, I’d
just repair the damage as best I could.
I started with the Authors Page, and used it to link to the
entries I had written on Gregory Benford’s novel Jupiter Project. When I pressed the Publish button, an area
that differentiated between Home (where my posts show up) and the Authors Page showed up on
the side of my blog. This area was another element I could position anywhere I wished, just like the Blogroll,
the About Me area, and the archives.
This useful tool had waited for me, but because I couldn’t perceive how it would look and interact with the rest of my blog, I had feared
to use it. Now that I can see how Pages
works, I started organizing last year’s posts onto Pages such as TV shows, Movies,
and Travel. (If you want to read the post I wrote on Thirteen Orphans, you can find it on the Authors Page, under Jane Lindskold).
I just wish I had leapt onto the Pages feature sooner, even
if I couldn’t see where I was leaping. I
wonder what discoveries await me, in other areas of my life, once I decide to
leap onto them as well.
Dragon Dave
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