I’ve joined a WordPress Challenge to revisit my blog and take some time to make some new discoveries to the things that I write and put up online.   So expect to see a few Blogging 101 post over the next few weeks.

Well it wouldn’t be a Birds as Poetry blog if we didn’t feature some birds, so here are few from a recent You Yangs morning.  Then we’ll get down to blogging assignment.

I’ve added a black border to the images that matches the look and feel of the blog.  I like that sort of co-ordinated feel.

 

Which Brings us to Blogging 101

One of the challenges is to revisit the reason for the blog in the first place.  Bird as Poetry is not the first blog I had been working on.  I used to use a wonderful Mac program called iWeb.   And it was auto published to another piece of Apple Goodness called MobileMe.  But of course Apple moved on and the blog had to have a new home.
Enter Telstra.  Bigpond in particular.  And they housed my ramblings which at the time included lots of updates of Classic car photos we were making, (and selling!).  But,  Telstra too decided that charging big bucks for their service didn’t include a website and so Birds As Poetry was lonely again.

With all that background I was over a xmas break looking for nothing in particular in a newsagents and found a “How to make a WordPress Blog” mag, and with little else on over the holiday, snapped it up, proceeded to the computer and began.  Which is why the earliest in this blog is about 2012.  The rest just wafted off into the ether. Or where ever else stuff goes when you hit the DELETE button.

Finding a “voice” that suited my writing style and the blog I suppose was always a big part of the challenge.   Making it tongue in check and introducing some elements from everday life became a part of my process. Think Pie Shops, Coffee Places.  interesting characters and places we’ve visited: Think “A Bridge that needed a Jolly Good Walking to”

Around the same time I began collecting a collection of collectable photos of walks around Woodlands Historic Park.  Not far from home, and filled with really interesting birds, and as my knowledge of bird photography grew, so did my collection of robins and the like.

I was also teaching a class on visual elements in photography and the concept of visual poetry.  A hop step and a really big jump through Haiku poetry lead to Birds as Poetry as a title  So it stuck.

I suppose I could have taken  a step to extend ‘how to’ articles but let’s face it, google will find you plenty. A scant few of them might in fact be useful, and correct, the rest?  Well, mostly just un initiated rambles by people who haven’t done the hard yards behind a camera.

Who dear reader are you?  Mostly I think folk that have either found the blog, or have been directed here by either word of mouth or from my Flickr site.  Flickr!  Gotta talk about that sometime too.

I really wish there was a much better co-ordination between Flickr and WordPress. But not so.

How to measure the success of the site. Well here’s the scoop. Its not a competition.  In another part of my life I Tai Chi.  A very personal activity that has little that can be measured or passed on to others.  So blogging, So  birding.
A thought that reverberates with me is “Birding is not a Spectator Sport!”.

I once started a blog that was going to try and see birding as a spectator sport with commentators and scores and all sorts of things. But. I may yet.

I do enjoy the comments that occasionally come my way, and thanks to all those who’ve taken the time to drop me  a note about some of the photos.  Makes the keyboard experience a little more involving.

So there we are.  Well done for persevering to the end of page 1.