15 Years of Blogger

I started using Blogger 15 years ago, in April. I did some meta-blogging about the Blogger platform last year when I was feeling particularly unhappy with Google and their limited support for the Blogger service. In this blog post, I want to reflect on my blogging experience.

And Twitter, too

Twitter anniversary (click image to enlarge)

I also began using Twitter in April (of 2009). This blog, (wikifiction) was not my first Blogger blog. I started the wikifiction blog just about the same time when I began using Twitter. Almost all of my tweets are related to science fiction.

However, as can be seen in the image to the left, I do respond to other people's tweets that have nothing to do with science fiction.

Going Viral

April 5th - Traffic to the wikifiction blog

Here in 2020, as a science educator, I have felt the need to link some folks on Twitter to good sources of information about the Covid-19 pandemic. Most of the people who visit this blog are from the USA, but today there is heavy traffic from Italy (see the map, to the right).

The wikifiction blog has a special connection to Italy. In the Exode Saga, I imagine that in the Ekcolir Reality, the Etruscan civilization dominated Europe, not Rome.

Map source: CSSE at Johns Hopkins University

Also, in my story "Fru'wu: Our Alien Prometheus", I imagine that the young Mary Shelley visited Italy during an outbreak of malaria. That experience brought her in contact with an alien visitor to Earth.

Little did I know while writing that story back in 2016 that Italy would become a hot spot for the Covid-19 pandemic. While viruses have been a topic of discussion here at this blog prior to 2020 (example), I've only made a few virus-related posts to Twitter (example).

A viral tweet, March 22nd 2020

While I'm linking to past tweets (Related: the end of Twitter.), I must say that Twitter has now made it more difficult to obtain a link to tweets. Now you need to click on the tweet's ˅ button and select "Embed Tweet". Then scroll up and you can see the link in a hidden display box.

There are a few options for how you can adjust the appearance of an embedded tweet. The image shown below is an example of the "dark" option.

I began tracking the number of Covid-19 cases in the USA on January 26th. The "dark" image shown below illustrates that towards the end of January my thoughts turned to my science fiction story Exodemic, which features the world-altering effects of a virus.

The dark side. January 28, 2020 viral tweet.

Here in 2020, my usual style for blog posts is to include many images along with the text. I have Blogger image archives (example) that go back to the old days when Picasa was used to collect all the images that are used in blog posts.

Now, I routinely link each blog post to a Google Photos album that contains imaginary book and magazine covers.

I've tried to make the old Picasa-generated albums visible in Google Photos, but that does not seem to have worked.

Ghost of Picasa: image "comments" from 2010.

The controls provided by Google for the old blog image archives (like this one) are totally non-intuitive. There is a "MANAGE ACTIVITY" button that when clicked displays the list of "image comments" that I added into Picasa back in 2010.

Bottom Line
After 15 years of using Blogger, I'm still confused by the interface. Right now, there is a "Try the new Blogger" button, but I generally wait until Blogger forces me to use their new versions.

                                                                                Dear Diary

the new Blogger

Even with all the trials and tribulations of using Blogger, it does provide a workable (and FREE) way to keep an online diary. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to migrate this blog to WordPress should Google terminate the Blogger service. 😔
Related Reading: the new Blogger

Next: a complication for Nirutam

visit the Gallery of Book and Magazine Covers

Interesting item from Twitter