Tangled Branches: Cultivated
happenings in and around my zone 6b gardens in northern Virginia and in central Virginia
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Still Blogging After All These Years
April 23, 2003: First blog post.
Blogger has changed a lot since then. There was no easy way to display photos, no provision for comments, and all blogspot-hosted blogs carried advertising.
And the blogging community has grown from a tiny hamlet where everybody knows everybody into a huge metropolis where you don't necessarily even know your near neighbors. I'm finding it hard to keep up with lately. If blogging and blog-reading occupy more time than gardening, what will I write about? Does it matter what I write about if nobody else has the time to read it? Or would that be a good thing, because then I could go back to just chronicling the days' events without trying to make it interesting to others? Will people still be blogging five years from now?
But I'll tell ya one thing that hasn't changed in five years - real-life Neighbor C is still a thorn in my side. Just when my rhododendrons had grown large enough to hide most of his kids' swingset, he moved the swingset.
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| Note the rhododendrons to the |
Labels: blogging
15 Comments:
Congratulations on reaching the five-year mark, Entangled - it's been a pleasure to read your words!
Maybe the neighbors' kids thought those pesky evergreens were 'spoiling the view' of your flowers? I wonder what would happen if you feng shui'd them with a flat mirror faced in their direction to reflect the gazes back or a concave mirror to absorb them?
Annie at the Transplantable Rose
I'm down to one line descriptive sentences because of lack of time. I'm barely able to visit even a handful of blogs on my list let alone leave a comment.
Our neighbor in the new house in back put up a stink about the fence we erected to block the view of their ugly barracks like house. It cost them in the high $700k to buy the home but it's an eyesore to us. We were considering a stockade fence but opted for the more expensive and much better looking shadowbox cedar fence but they took it as an act of hostility and won't even acknowledge our existence when they see us in the yard as they drive by. The thing is they have the best part of the fence without the poles which would make an excellent backdrop for shrubs and planting beds but they choose to see it only as an obstruction. Whadayagonna do?
Annie: Thank you - I've been motivated in a large way by your kind and generous comments.
Funny you should mention mirrors - my spouse has wanted to do this for years. Another problem with Neighbor C is their outdoor floodlights which nicely illuminate the back of our house.
Ki: I'm very sympathetic about the time issue. I'd really like to read and comment more on other blogs, but time is the limiting factor.
Your fence sounds nice! It's a shame your neighbors don't like it. I wish my neighbors would put up that kind, but the only type permitted by the HOA is the see-through kind. Our neighbors on 3 sides have all put up split-rail and wire fences to keep their dogs in, which makes our lot look fenced. I'm grateful for that at least.
I hate those bright lights people put up. I like it dark with the stars just beyond my figertip reach.
I have not been with Blogger.com as long as you, but just in the past two years it has come a long way. Best part, I think, is when Google bought Picasa and started using their servers. What an improvement that was.
You are an old-timer at Blogging. Congratulations on reaching this milestone!
Wow... 5 years. And yet you never seem stale, or to fall into the doldrums like the rest of us. What's your secret?
The white sedum you asked about is sedum spathifolium and the variety is 'Cape Blanco.' I have read that it's a tough one to keep around in this climate, so I hope my well-draining soil helps me out here. This is already its summer coloring, by the way. In the winter it takes on tinges of pink and purple. I can't wait!
I will have been blogging for one full year on May 21. ;-)
I've been thinking about your post.
When I first started to blog in the twilight of 2004, I had a difficult time even trying to find a single garden blog. I remember Googling garden blogs and finding almost no entries! Eventually I found Kathy Purdy's Cold Climate Gardening blog and was thankful to receive any tips and encouragement she could give (hey, how come your blog didn't show up?). Now my list has grown so much I can barely visit all of them during the week let alone skim those on someone else's list or someone who left comments on any particular blog I happened to be reading or all the blogs on the aggregators sites. It is an impossible situation. I find I have favorites I visit often and those on a second tier not so often then those I rarely visit. I do tend to look at blogs of people who have left comments on my own blog as a courtesy and often I find a sympatico with those people although I find it annoying sometimes when I see those "gee whiz" type of comment. But everyone's hard pressed for time so I can understand why such comments are left. I've been guilty of doing so.
I do notice the blogs that relate personal thoughts or reveal something of the writer's personality seem to engender more comments. I'm a visual person so I tend to like blogs with lots of photos and factual information especially those with unusual plants or ones I don't have.
I remember advice on blog writing: keep it simple, short sentences, one paragraph, catchy first sentence and heading all because you had to get people's attention immediately or they'd move on. If you didn't get their attention in 2 seconds they wouldn't read your blog. With the advent of photo blogging the picture is the grabber and hopefully they'll read your writing. I still occasionally see blogs w/o photos and they certainly look plain and uninviting.
I guess for me it comes down to my exuberance for growing and observing things. I put it out and if anyone cares to take a look that's all I can ask for. When I run out of new plants I'll be a goner.
Barbee: Oh, yes, I 'd much rather see the stars than my neighbors' lights. I'm a big fan of Picasa - it may have fewer features than some of the other online photo services, but it's very intuitive and easy to use.
Robin: Thanks! I'm an old-timer at lots of things ;-)
Kim: You flatter me (and I like it!) I like to keep learning and trying new things. Oh, and I'm also easily entertained. ;-)
Thanks for the sedum info. And I'm really glad to know that I hadn't asked about it before. There are so many interesting sedums on the market now.
Shady Gardener: I think one of the great things about blogging (and journaling, I suppose) is watching the progress of the yearly cycle. I'll look for your anniversary post!
Ki: Your comment came in between the time I started my replies and the time I finished them. Lots to think about here..... (to be continued)
I enjoyed your first post and I think it's wonderful that you have a record to track the changes in your garden from year to year. You truly are a garden-blogging pioneer!
It will be interesting to see where blogging goes in the next few years. I know that I can't possibly keep up with all the garden blogs anymore. So I suppose as with most everything else in our lives, I'll end up reading the blogs that most resonate with me - I don't want to cut out reading my other favourite non-garden blogs and I do want to have a life beyond the blogworld.
Pesky neighbours - your comments reminded me of my mum's efforts at the cottage. She worked tirelessly to plant all these shrubs to hide the neighbour's old and ugly trailer. Just when the shrubs had completely filled in and blocked the trailer, the neighbours moved it to another location where it was prominently on display yet again. So last year my mum started the process all over again to cover it up. She's hoping by the time she hits 85 in 4 years, that she'll have hidden the trailer yet again. Persistence pays off, huh?
I hear you on neighbor's lights. Our neighbors, who are wonderful, have a motion sensor light that seems to be pointed directly at our hot tub. I hate to mention it to them, and they're rarely NOT there that I could just reposition the sensor a bit. It's hard to go out for a midnight dip without feeling like we're being interrogated.
Ki: I've been struggling with these same issues myself for a while now. There are so many excellent garden blogs now that I just can't get around and visit them all AND have a real life instead of a virtual one. I hate to pick and choose, but it has to be done. I too, tend to comment on other blogs when the author has left a comment here, and I'd like to think I have some sort of rapport with those who comment frequently. There are a few, however, that I visit all the time but rarely comment on - Don in Iowa comes to mind here. He grows such an amazing variety of interesting plants that unless I have a question about something specific, I'd constantly be making that "gee whiz" sort of comment.
I remember searching for garden blogs when I began this one but not finding any. I think Technorati may have been around then, but they were mainly concerned with tech and political blogs. The only kind of blogrolls or lists were done by people who were manually coding them into their blog templates or personal web pages. I was surprised to find my blog listed on Cold Climate Gardening, and then equally surprised when it disappeared from there.
I've been coding HTML pages since, oh, 1995 maybe? Early on, web designers were concerned with making their pages efficient. Most people were accessing the Internet via dial-up connections, and it was important that pages load quickly. I was still operating under that mindset in 2003, so initially I didn't have any photographs. Then I started creating separate galleries with a little thumbnail in the blog posts that people could click through if they wanted to see the photos. I think I didn't start embedding any larger photos in the blog posts until last year. Set in my ways.
I've wondered whether people would get tired of seeing the same flowers year after year, but to me anyway, it's interesting to know how plants grow and change over the years. So keep posting even if you don't plant anything new!
Kate: I've been skimming over many of the non-gardening blogs I used to read regularly, and I'd really like get garden blogging back into some kind of perspective. Not sure yet just how I'm going to do that.
Your mother's situation sounds very like mine. My neighbor moves things and cuts down more trees every year. I think it took the rhododendrons 8 years to cover the swingset, but I hope we'll have sold that house and moved permanently to the country before another 8 years go by.
Jim: How inconvenient (and inconsiderate)! You don't suppose they pointed the motion sensor at your hot tub on purpose? ;-)
There is lots of good stuff here (especially in these comments) but I'm reacting to the perfectly "timed" punchline. "he moved the swingset."
Love it. Very funny.
But yes, what can you do?
I have mostly good neighbors and one real problem. It is just part of living here.
I am reminded of something someone told me once. They'd just purchased 100 acres or something and were building a house IN THE MIDDLE of it. They wanted privacy. I said, you don't need 100 acres for privacy, 5 or 10 should do it. Why not pick a nice corner of the parcel and that way you won't have the expense of the road going in. The answer: "i don't need 100 acres to live on, I need 100 acres to make sure OTHER PEOPLE don't live on it." Ha! It might have been 50 acres. At any rate, it was in Texas where vistas are long.
I'd love to live on 100 acres.
County Clerk: Our neighbors are mostly nice people, but this guy in back has a very different vision of how his property should look than I do. And these lots are oddly shaped, so our longest and most visible boundary is along the back against his lot. There's a long history here - I should do a blog post all about it one day.
I understand the 100 acre sentiment exactly. We bought 4 acres in the country a couple of years ago, intending it to be a weekend/retirement destination. It seemed huge at the time, but now we're considering something larger.
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