Sooo. I've been absent from the blogosphere for most of April (three weeks now?).
This is a) an apology for abandoning all your lovely blogs in that time! and b) an assurance that I'm just taking a bit of time off and will return to my poor blog eventually. Even though it isn't truly a Jem-haitus unless it's completely random and unannounced??
I'm sure most of you know about Camp NaNoWriMo, and a significant number of you may well be participating. Hopefully you'll sympathize! (especially when I tell you I'm working on study + assessments for my Camp goal. Funnn.)
How's Camp going for you? Tell me your goals! and I'll give you virtual lamingtons (or TimTams, if you don't like coconut?) Do you struggle to keep up with the blogosphere sometimes? (Do you have advice on how to keep up with the blogosphere and also not abandon life??)
"What??" I hear you say. "Jem's going to be posting on Friday! She can't be posting today - she only posts once a week!"
Well, yes. I only post once a week (maximum)because I don't want to go raising your expectations. But today is special! so of course it's 7pm and I've just remembered I needed to actually write this post.
........
Everyone in the blogosphere (it seems) has been having an anniversary. Several blogs reached one year old over the last few months - and they're so lovely-looking for baby bloggers that I'm in awe - but one of note is turning seven. Seven. Wow. (Go congratulate Christine, okay?)
Anyway, I'm jumping on this trend: I, too, am having a blog anniversary!Blogoversary! Blog... birthday??
One year ago today, I started this blog. I didn't have any huge ambitions for it, or even any idea what I was going to do with it, but my TAFE studies required me to start a social media platform (just to show I could), and the alternative was Facebook.
I've seen my grandmother's Facebook feed. It frankly scares me.
So! It's been one year. I gradually developed a kind-of aim, although I'm still pretty scattered in my topics, and I joined the community of young Christian writers. It was intimidating at first, because everyone knew each other and the blogs all seemed to be huge famous things that wouldn't want me there.
(I have since discovered that's a crazy way to think and that everyone here is welcoming and a lovely person.) But I still get intimidated. *sighs at self*
I now have 43 followers on the Blogger gadget, and at least 12 email followers! You all are amazing and quite possibly slightly crazy. Thank you for reading what I have to say. <3 And to everyone who reads and/or comments, whether or not you're following, I extend a huge thank you as well! Every comment is special to me, however short or long it is. (or: however formal or scream-y.)
*throws lamingtons and TimTams at you all* *no confetti, because that would get in the food*
........
And, back in December, Melissa Gravitistagged me for the #MyFirstPostRevisited hop. I decided to save it for this particular occasion, because there's really no better way to celebrate than by looking back at your past self and cringing, right?
The Rules for the hop, originally started by Sarah:
No cheating. You must highlight your first post. Not your second post, not one you love… the first post only.
Link back to the person who tagged you (thank them if you feel like it or, if not, curse them with a plague of ladybugs).
Cut and paste your old post into a new post or reblog your own bad self. (Either way is fine, but NO editing.)
Put the hashtag #MyFirstPostRevisited in your title.
Tag five (5) other bloggers to take up this challenge.
Notify your tags in the comment section of their blog (don’t just hope they notice a pingback somewhere in their spam).
Feel free to cut and paste the badge to use in your post.
Include “the rules” in your post.
Thanks, Melissa! *starts scavenging for a few friendly ladybugs because I'm not sure how to feel about this tag*
'kay, here we go.
........
So I seem to have a blog.
?
Well, at the moment you can probably expect casual posts about writing - including encouragement, the details of a few points of grammar, occasional rants on the writing life, and hopefully some flash fiction prompts. Also, I'll probably write about reading and libraries, and no doubt there'll be fandom references.
Of course, there will be deviations from the writerly theme when I find a new favourite thing, so please excuse. (Mug cakes. So cool. I'll stuff them under 'writing life', actually, because they're quick and easy and gooey and there's just something about eating cake out of a mug that has me enthralled.)
........
(Sadly, the mug cakes sort of... died.)
That was not as bad as I'd maybe anticipated?? *sends Melissa happy yellow ladybugs*It was also not very exciting. But to be fair, my only known audience for my first post was my TAFE lecturer. See if you don't think that would cramp your style.
The Dragon Queen who's planning on taking over earth from her base on Jupiter
...guess who?
Look. I can't find the archives, okay? And once or twice she's threatened terrible things to anyone who hunts through her old posts. She's such a successful blogger, considering she routinely threatens her audience, and I want to see where she started from.
I dare you, Cait. I daaaare you. *puppy eyes*
........
So... that's my blogoversary. I'd have done a Q&A, but I'm too secretive I wasn't very organised. Or organised at all. So, since you might have to wait for next year's blogoversary, I hope there was nothing dreadfully urgent you wanted to ask me!
(If there was - "what are your opinions on pineapple on pizza", for example, which is obviously a very urgent question and is also one I stole from Evangeline's recent Q&A - you would have to ask me in the comments. I promise I would answer. As long as this hypothetical question was urgent. And important. Like "would an alpaca or a goat be a more dangerous ride for a small child". Urgent questions, see.)
How long have you been blogging? Don't there seem to be a lot of blogs turning one in the last few months? If yours was one of them, tell me in the comments! Also ask any urgent questions you may have. If you're a follower of Paper Fury, are you anxious to see her first post? (answer: yes.) Have you found the young writers circles of the blogosphere to be wonderfully welcoming? (if not, tell me, and I'll give you more lamingtons. as a welcome.)
Also, shoutout to Miss March (who runs a beautifully classic/period drama appreciation style of blog) for being my first ever commenter (and the only commenter on my first, oh, five posts?) It meant a lot to me. <3
I sent her a dare to go in the Virtual Hat of Consequences
and I laughed because aPPARENTLY IF YOU HAVE NO BRAIN YOU FEEL NO FEAR
Now obviously this should have meant I would COMPLETE MY GOAL and not lose NaNo. Because the consequences were just too terrible to contemplate.
Lo and behold, I did not win NaNo. Probably because I didn't write for the third and fourth week? I mean, I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure that's a bit of a red flag for non-dedication.
So even though I keep blaming Kenzie, this is entirely my fault.
It's just... she's laughing. I know she's laughing. I CAN HEAR YOU LAUGHING, KENZIE.
........
But what dare did I get? (you can see the whole post + options here!)
First try, I rolled a five: "Let a sibling or friend who you really don't want in control of your blog write the next post". I am so glad I couldn't do that one. because it was mine.
Then I rolled twelve: "roll the dice separately and do each!"
Then I rolled two ones, which was "Impossible! (Unless you're a Jedi...)" So I'm obviously a Jedi master and do not need to do a dare at all.
Buuut I felt like I should try again.
And I got two fours: "Publish at least one chapter (or section) of the most embarrassing novel you've ever written."(This dare was courtesy of Kirsten at Simple Love.)
I blinked twice ("...okay...") and then a very, very old story flashed through my suddenly tense mind. Quite frankly, if I wasn't such an honourable person, I would have gone with my first response:
I have no idea who this is, but I identify with his amount of nOPE.
But as I said, I have my sense of honour! So. Here it is. My first ever 'long' piece of writing (unfinished at 43 A5 pages), which also happens to be the. most. embarrassing. I just don't know what I was thinking (or why I hadn't burnt it before now??)
You may begin the throwing up. Or tears of laughter. Whichever response you're inclined towards. (I vote for aggressive clicking of the red x at the top right of your browser? but that's just me.)
So I spent the last two weeks on a work placement, which was awesome! but also took from 8:30-5. And I KNOW that's fairly regular hours for a job (I DON'T WANT TO ADULT, SURPRISE!!), but I also had a ~2-hour round drive. So. That + my assessment = minimal blogging time.
(Hint: do not leave assessments until the date they're due when that date coincides the last day of a two-week work placement which means you'll be out from 7:30am until 6pm.)
(If you needed that advice.)
But now I'm back! Or not. To be honest, I'll be just as sporadic as ever.
...annnyway. Let's leave the uncomfortable confessions there, shall we??
Today, I've written [discovered that I had actually had a draft already for] a post on coding! Specifically, writing code that will help you when blogging. So enjoy!
[Note: this post is actually rather ironic considering recent events. I wrote the draft of this post, giving tips from my experience in coding, and then I discovered that I'd messed up something, somewhere in my blog's code, which made the sidebar refuse to behave. BUT I FIXED IT. (With your awesome help.) So I'm definitely qualified to be teaching this subject 'cause debugging code is way harder than writing it.]
*pretends to be super-qualified*
a few coding tricks for bloggers
A great way to personalise your blog, and to smarten it up from the Blogger templates (which are sometimes a bit tacky), is to play around with the coding.
And since we're talking about coding tricks, Autumn (at Autumn Reads and Writes) wrote an amazing post about how to change how links look in your blog![I confess it was not a recent post. I'm a slacker, okay?? But it's still a good resource!] And when you hover over the links, they look like this! or this!! or this!!! GO AND READ HER POST IT'S GREAT OKAY?? (+ I'm not going to just copy it out here, so you have to go read what she said.)
So that's one trick. You can actually make it look like this, too, which is an effect I figured out while messing with it. Baaasically go to Autumn's post, read her instructions, and then instead of putting in:
a:hover {
letter-spacing: .5em;
}
This will... make more sense when you've read Autumn's post. Unless you already know HTML/CSS, in which case you'll probably be beyond this post.
And... that's links!
*awkward cough*
Now, for my second trick... have you ever wanted to do
this?
It's pretty cool to be able to make little title-things without having to save/upload images of text. Not that I've actually used this yet. Never mind. I will one day.
Okey-dokey. I'm just going to assume you want to know how to do this? and tell you. I'm also going to assume you haven't used HTML at all, or very little. If you have, you'll be able to skip these first few steps.
Note: Autumn's special features on the links are done within Blogger's Template function - that way, they apply to all links on your blog. Right now, I'm going to be doing coding (HTML/CSS) within the post I'm currently writing on Blogger; my coding will only apply to the specific thing I apply it to.
So, start by writing your text! In Blogger. The regular way. And centre it. Like so:
Pretty text!
Now. On the very left of Blogger's Write Post toolbar - the one that has such helpful things like italics, font size, and strike-through - you'll see two grey buttons: Compose and HTML. Click HTML.
"AAH WHAT JUST HAPPENED THIS IS UGLYYY."
Yes, HTML is not the nicest thing to look at. BUT IT'S FUNCTIONAL. So.
Now, inside your HTML view, the text you just wrote will look like this:
<div>...</div> just sort of wraps stuff into a block that can be manipulated. Whenever you tell Blogger to centre something, it puts a div around it, so it can apply style="text-align: center;". "Style" is a way to put CSS (the coding language that does all the colour, borders, everything pretty!) into your HTML without having to link to a specific CSS document.
But now you want to put a <span>...</span> into your code. (At least, that's how I do it. It's not the only way, I'm sure.) So coding-wise, my example looks like this:
<divstyle="text-align: center;"><spanstyle="color: lime; font-family: 'Aclonica', 'Open Sans Condensed', 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 40px;">this?</span></div>
[Note: I don't know that 'Aclonica' is a font that will work by itself or not in a web browser? So I've put
at the very top of the page when in the HTML view. This ensures that the browser people use to view the post will know what font to use. Note also that I have two back-up fonts - 'Open Sans Condensed' and 'Times New Roman' - in case this doesn't work. Because sometimes code does bizarre stuff and I have no idea why.]
So let's break that down:
The div, as I explained, is to make the section into a kind of block. (If anyone reading has a better way of explaining it, please chip in!
The style="..." is to insert CSS into that particular div.
text-align: center; is CSS. It centres the div. (shocking, I know.)
The span tag is to, I don't know, mark a specific spot? It's like a div, but tends to mark part of a line of text or something, instead of blocking out a whole paragraph or whatever. (I never said I was an expert, okay?? I have a working knowledge.)
Again, we have style, but this time inside the span.
Now within that there are a few CSS elements:
color: lime; -- this colours the text. You should probably use a six-digit colour code (e.g. #f97285) instead - that's more reliable, as it can be hard to guess what colour names are supported by the browsers! Google 'color picker'.
font-family: 'Aclonica', 'Open Sans Condensed', 'Times New Roman'; -- this is the font. 'Aclonica' is (I hope) the one that's actually being used; the other two are back-ups. I already went into this a bit [above].
font-size: 40px; -- this is to make the text huge. Play around with it; it's really easy to just switch another number in.
Mostly it should work right if you make sure to keep the punctuation marks right? So this:
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: lime; font-family: 'Aclonica', 'Open Sans Condensed', Times New Roman'; font-size: 40px;">And now you can do this!</span>
</div>
should turn out like this:
And now you can
do this!
I don't know. Is this clear? Ask me any questions if it wasn't!
And (for if you're familiar with HTML and CSS): it seems like you can put CSS within your post as a "style" section (not just inline)? I didn't know that, but when I was trying to put in the CSS (for the links at the start of this post) to demonstrate what Autumn did with the links, I put a <style></style> section into the very top of my post and apparently putting CSS in there works fine?? (If it doesn't show up right, please tell me!)
And finally, I should mention that I was trying to figure out how to put code in this post so it looked like code (instead of doing what it's, you know, supposed to do??) and I ended up using hilite.me. Then, of course, once I'd done that, I realised that if I write code while not in the HTML view, it showed up how I wanted it to just fine. So (due to editing and stuff) half the time my code is in fancy colours/boxes... and half the time it's not.
So this post has been a leeettle bit jumpy and what-is-plot-y. What are you saying of course that's not how I write. Or how I live my life. Nope. I hope it wasn't too confusing, and maybe helps you a bit! Even if it just gets you interested in exploring what you can do for your blog with CSS.
Have you ever used HTML and CSS for your blog? What tips/tricks do you recommend? Are you going to try any of these? Did I make any mistakes?? (answer: yes. It was written in too many late-night sessions. Obv. there will be mistakes.)
I'm supposed to be working on my tertiary studies right now. Or updating/rewriting my resume because MY LIBRARY HAS A POSITION OPEN for one week only. (The last two times I [obviously] didn't get the job, but I just have to keep trying... the head librarian wants me there, so eventually it's got to happen! xD)
And instead I'm wandering the writerly circles of the blogosphere.
I know right. Such a surprise.
BUT I FOUND OUT SOME INTERESTING THINGS. Which I thought I'd share with you, because I haven't seen anyone talking about them in the blogs I follow... so you might not hear about these things either. So I'm telling you, just to make sure.
Firstly, Project Canvas has a blog. I was pleased to see that, because I hadn't heard any updates from Project Canvas for a while and I was hoping it hadn't died a slow and lingering death. It's true that there's only one post, a 'welcome!' one from a month ago, but by following the blog I can keep myself in the loop.
If you don't know about Project Canvas, the basic idea is that
"A group of teen and young adult writers from around the globe have come together to write a book of advice and inspiration for fellow writers.
I said (several months ago) that I could probably help with some editing, but I actually don't know how the book's progressing... its projected publication date is in 2018, but I haven't had to edit anything, so it's possible they didn't need my help.
I don't know! Maybe you've all submitted articles? and you're keeping a close eye on the whole project? and I know at least five of my followers are already following the blog. BUT THIS IS JUST IN CASE YOU HAVEN'T HEARD.
Just as a note, Hannah is part of the Project Canvas team! And so are Abigayle and Aimee - I don't know them well, but I've seen them around the blogosphere, so some of you would know them.
The competition is different to the usual sort seen on the blogosphere, too: She posts a photo of where she is, and we guess in the comments (she edits out the answers, though, so no sneaky copying there! ;). Correct state is 1 point; city is 4 points. There will be 10 photos, and the person with the most points at the end wins. The prize is a galley of The Traitor's Game.
- but I'm not sure how much longer it's open (or if I'm such a slack poster that it's already shut...)
(To be honest, I'd do this even if there was no prize. It makes me feel like Sherlock Holmes. Mwahaha.)
(Although the fact that I'm not from the USA might put me at a disadvantage, as I have no idea about American tourist spots/heritage buildings/anything else like that which might be put in a photograph...)
_ _ _ _ _
And... there was something else I was going to say... ??
OOOH YES.
Catherine Meek, one of the [main?] people behind Project Canvas, is joining with Aimee to create a kind of blogging link-up thing! Except this one will really tickle the fancy of any of you who like snail mail...
#thefriendlyneighborhoodjournal
One blogger will get the Friendly Neighborhood Journal in the post, put some poetry/art/encouraging words/something nice etc into the pages, and then post it to the next address (which Catherine and Aimee provide). And when it arrives, the process will be repeated.
These guys are sending an actual. physical. notebook. ACROSS THE USA. (+ possibly the world? at least, I'm in Australia.) Imagine the love + faith + encouragement that could come from that! Imagine a book, slightly travel-worn, slim, but heavy with the words of friends and strangers, overflowing with kind and uplifting words. Imagine receiving it in the mail.
I'm in love with the idea.
There is the problem with providing a physical address. Seriously, I don't want anyone on the internet to be able to find me!? But I'm hoping it can be sorted out - Catherine suggested, in response to another blogger's concerns, that they could sandwich a blogger between two people s/he knows, so sharing the address wouldn't be a problem. I think that would work for me??
So basically I want to see ALL YOUR NAMES in this Friendly Neighborhood Journal when it arrives in my mailbox. ;D
_ _ _ _ _
Are you familiar with Project Canvas? (Did you submit an article?) Have you read The False Prince? (and if not, what are you doing with your life???) Do you love snail mail? Might you, maybe, be signing up for #thefriendlyneighborhoodjournal ??
And how do you keep up with what's happening in the blogosphere? because it's a bit hit-and-miss for me. (Same as for what books are being released.)
Note: I may not be around much for the next two weeks. I'm doing work experience at... *fanfare* the library. (*cue surprise all round*) Plus I should probably study. Probably. So I'll see how things go. I'll definitely still reply to your lovely comments, though!
On my last post, Ivie made it known to me that my sidebar isn't showing up right.
[If you can see a big white space on the left, that's where the sidebar's supposed to be.]
When I looked into it, I found that, for me, Firefox worked fine, while Chrome and IE didn't. I also discovered that the sidebar was not gone, but was off-screen: if I zoomed waaay out, it's still there (and it's pushing the footer down too far). Like so:
I spent such a long time going through forums, which said mostly that the probable cause is A) copying content from Word or somewhere else, which brought incompatible formatting with it, or B) an unclosed <div> somewhere.
Then I spent sUCH. A LONG. TIME. going through all my posts. (I'm just glad I don't have more, which is not something I usually say.) And while I found (and ruthlessly ironed out) some frankly disgusting HTML,
I can't find the problem.
So I need a favour.
Could you please write and tell me:
1. What browser are you using? 2. Can you see the sidebar? 3. If not, do you have any idea when you last saw it?
I would really appreciate it. Your comment doesn't have to be long or flowery. I typically worry that my comments will seem terse if they're too short, but if you write even just write one-word answers, I will be very grateful for the information.
Thank you for aiding me in the fight against the technology. I know with your assistance I can crush its rebellion.
...thank you, Strax. I'll keep your advice in mind.
