The Beginning

 Yesterday, I participated in the Tuesday4 that was about reflections on blogging. One of the questions was how did you come up with the name. My very first blog post ten years ago was about the name, so I'm rerunning here to better answer the question. BTW, I had no idea what my first post was about until I looked it up.

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What's in a name?

I've been toying with writing a blog for a while now and decided it was time to put thoughts into actions. It all seemed so simple. Use one of the free blog sites and start writing. But wait, what was it going to be about and what would I call it? My kids advised me that I needed a subject or it would be nothing more than an online journal. Well, since I'm not that knowledgeable or passionate about any one subject, I decided that it would be personal reflections. My idea was to make comments about things I experience or see around me that other people may be able to relate to. Now what to name it. Not as easy as it would seem. With the millions of blogs out there, there's not much left to choose from.

My first idea was Observations of an everyday boring life. However, it was suggested that I don't need to tell people ahead of time that my life is often boring. Next I played with, Run of the mill, Matter of fact, and So on and so forth. All taken. Next was Watching paint Dry, but that was taken also with actual web cams set up to watch paint dry. How about Dull as Dishwater?  Maybe that was giving too much away ahead of time again. (BTW, the original phrase was supposedly, "Dull as Ditch Water.") 

I was going to have to get creative. The family started brainstorming. Running with safety scissors and Your guess is as good as mine. Taken. My personal favorite was one I thought up- Lend me your nose. A play on Lend me your ear but using nose indicating that you should Take time to stop and smell the roses. 

After several more hours of deep thought, I settled on Live and Learn-Toss and Turn. This title is supposed to indicate that no matter what happens to us, we can always learn from it and the unknown can still be a little scary and cause us to toss and turn. Or maybe the title just means, that I was really tired and the rhyming of the words seemed good enough. This morning my son asked me what name I came up with and after I told him, he replied, "Well, it's not as bad as I thought it would be." I don't think I will ever be able to live down, "Lend me your nose."

It's been two years since I started to blog and most of you (all of you) were not with me in the beginning, so I am revisiting a few posts about getting started. Today's is about when I was trying to figure out how long my posts should be.

It's been two years since I started to blog and most of you (all of you) were not with me in the beginning, so I am revisiting a few posts about getting started. Today's is about when I was trying to figure out how long my posts should be.

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Long and the Short of It

How long should my posts be? I've been pondering this since I decided to try my hand at blogging. I'll have to admit that I am behind the technology curve that has the trend of shortening everything. I don't regularly text. I tried to open a Twitter account, but kept having problems with my password. I usually use complete words in emails. In other words, it's easy to tell that I'm over thirty. I remember when I was in college, I was introduced to the book,  "CDB" by William Steig. I thought it was very clever. The entire book was just line-drawings and letters that sounded out words.( “CDB=See the bee.”) Who knew years later, that this style of writing would be commonplace.

I looked around a little* and found that different kinds of blogs, on average, have different lengths. Gossip blogs are usually the shortest (~100 words) and reference blogs are the longest (~1500 words.) Most blog entries are 100-500 words. Also, the average person spends about 1 ½ minutes reading a blog post. As an experiment, I asked Ward, Wally, and Theodore to read a well-written long blog post (not mine) for 1 ½ minutes and see how far they got. Theodore read 500 words, Ward read 371 words, and I read 411 words during our 90 second experiments. Wally said he was busy with an online meeting. It seems, from this totally nonscientific project, that bloggers have figured out how long they have an audience and write a length to match this.

What does this mean? I'm not sure except Theodore says that writing about your blog in a blog is odd. That's the short of it.

*How Long is the Ideal Blog Post?
  Post lenght-How Long Should a Blog Post Be?