Inktrails from Alaska

Note to Modern Young People

Dear Young People,

You don't have to be famous, you don't have to want to be famous, and you don't need to fix yourself to be on Youtube or Facebook or Vines...Please go out into the world and volunteer to help at the animal shelter, or join a choir, or a band, or help Habitat for Humanity. Learn to paint, play an instrument, or how to invest! Take a hike, play with the dog, or your cousins or little brothers and sisters.

Stop obsessing about how you look, and taking pictures of yourself all the time. Enjoy experiences without taking movies of them. Snap a couple pictures if you will, but move on and ENJOY life, instead of holding it at arm's length with a cell phone.

Trust me, you'll be happier in the long run!

Love,

Your Universal Mom

How Many Blogs Does a Person Need?

Blog software makers advise potential bloggers to specialize, and write about just one subject, so that you'll attract a specific and presumably large audience. Julie Powell's blog about making all the recipes in Julia Childs' book is one very good example. Of course she didn't write solely about cooking because real life intruded, as it tends to do. I know someone who writes only about being a nurse practitioner, another who writes only about being an entrepreneur. Some blog only about politics, some about the environment. Then there are the blogs "written" by dogs, cats, horses...  ("For dinner we had dogfood... again!")

This blog, Jean's Northern Niche, doesn't take that advice. I write about whatever is most interesting to me at the moment, regardless of the subject. I don't have a huge following. I look in vain for comments every day. Would I have more readers if I specialized?

I have two other blogs, one for book reviews and one for my music studio. Do I need one for my paintings and collages? One for my writing (heavy sigh: all the stories I've started but not yet finished)? Another for the dogs and the parrot? Or one for each? Do I have to begin yet another blog for all the Alaskana?

For fifteen years I taught computing, and am still quite involved with technology, albeit as I can afford to be involved. Being involved involves buying gadgets. In that way, as my income waxes and wanes, I am often uninvolved. However I do write about it, and plan to become very involved with a new Mac as soon as possible.

Do I then need a blog to cover my political views? What about my take on current events? Oh, I suppose I should start a movie review blog, too. Plus I'm getting older, so I should start a blog about being an aging baby boomer, right? Plus one about being a woman in the outskirts of civilization, not to mention the whole issue of being a woman in our sexist society in general.

I need to drop about thirty pounds, and have considered starting a weight-loss blog (with weekly pictures)  to help inspire others and perhaps even garner some support for my efforts. However I haven't lost weight yet, and I haven't started another blog, either.

I actually think the weight loss blog is a good idea, and I'll post the url when I get it started. But do you see why this blog is what it is? A huge mishmash of STUFF? It has to be that way, because that is my life: a huge mishmash of stuff. Fun stuff, mostly.

Something interesting happens every day. A moose or woodpecker comes calling. The dogs do something that makes me laugh (well, they do that every day). Sarah Palin says something incredibly ignorant. Some crazy woman decided to have eight babies when she already has six already. Buddy bird says something unexpected and with hilarious appropriateness.  I see a movie that makes me think. I finish a painting, or story, or create something else (this week it was a sign). And so on.

If I want to follow the advice of all the blog sites, I would have to drop all but one subject. So which subject to keep? I'd have to make this an only Alaska thing.  The dogs would have to have their own blog, which they might share with Buddy if he's nice to them. I could still talk about Alaska politics, but I'd have to leave the National scene alone.

I'd stop posting anything about music,dogs, parrot, art, dance, movies, TV, current events...is that what you want? Tell me, why do you read this blog?

The Key Words

It is 11:44 pm as I watch a line of clouds turn pink, magenta and lavender, lined with gray against a pale, pale blue sky. It's getting close to solstice and we'll be watching the sun chase itself in circles soon.

Much like the sun chasing itself, search engines seem to have magic words that chase down my blog. I check the links to see where folks have come from, to see what they are looking for, which keywords they are using.

It's very entertaining. Kind of like looking in the phone book for funny names. I am sure at least one of these folks was googlewhacking. He or she did a search on "offenbach clapping horses." That's three words, more than googlewhacking generally allows, but still, it's very strange. Googlewhacking is going to Google, typing in two random words, two unrelated words, and trying to see if you can come up with just ONE website. I've done it about three times. It's not easy. Look up "googlewhack" on Google and you'll find out all about it.

Stories could be told about the people who are using search engines and who find and come to this site. What's behind the person who kept searching for something about "children born without a corpus collosum"? Did she (I just feel it had to be a she) ever find that someone could actually exist that way, or could possibly have been born that way? I know that experiments with epileptics have been done, cutting the corpus collosum to eliminate the seizures. Unfortunately this results in the left hand actually, truly and factually not knowing what the right hand is doing. Hmmm. Maybe people born this way, if there are any, become politicians.

How about "superwoman body paint?" Now that brings up an interesting image.

Someone found my site by looking for "planting Swedish aspens."

And then there are the usual people looking for porn. My post "All Wet" gets hits all the time from people searching for "wet" this and that. You can figure that out, no elaboration is needed.

For a while I was getting visited by people looking for "niche music." What the hell is "niche music?" Doesn't every type of music fill some sort of niche?

I was gratified to find someone searching for "set in Antwerp," which led them to my review of The Shovel and the Loom. I hope to add more book reviews soon.

All in all I wonder what words I could use to make more people find and read my blog? Is there a set of words that people search for more than any others. Well, aside from "sex" and "fuck" and all the varied mispellings and codings of that sort of thing.

What do people really want to find?

Catching Up

I am quite pleased to have been able to import all the posts from my old blog in one swell foop, thanks to a php script some kind soul put out for others to use. It took some trial and error and the help of cyber friends to figure out all the arcane doodling that needed to be done but in the end everything came out just fine. Maybe not perfect, but good enough for me.

If you hadn't been to the old blog (which had self-destroyed its own database and no one at my hosting company cared to help--I'll be switching host companies soon--they doubled their rates and hired techs who don't help you, go figure) have fun browsing all the old posts.

Blog Mergings

As of today, I will be moving the blog entries from the old blog over here. I have been unsuccessful at exporting the posts, subjects and comments. And now the old blog has screwed itself up (AGAIN) and you can't read anything over there anyway. WordPress is just a horrible program. If anyone can help me export all my posts out of WordPress and into Movable Type I'd love to hear from you. All I can do is move them by hand, one at a time. I am not going to repost the comments, that would take just too much what with dialup being my only connection. As it is, it takes forever just to set the correct date on each post. So this will be a project that happens over time. However it will be worth it to bring such articles as How To Dress Alaskan over here! Stand by and expect new stuff overnight. It's going to have to be a late-night procedure, since it ties up the phone line.

Moving Days

I'm going to be moving my WordPress blog over here, as Typepad is far more robust and responsive. Stay tuned for more content and a much prettier interface! The old blog is still at http://www.celticandmore.com/nnblog .

Hope this Works

I'm doing this to flog myself into doing some regular writing. The best-kept secret of the century is that I'm actually a writer, not a musician. I have at least two books, one screenplay, and numerous stories all fairly well along but not finished. Hoping this will grease my literary gears, I'll add to this page as often as inspired to do so. Hope you enjoy it!