Well, I’ve been a “blogger” for about six weeks now. I created Bottom Bottle (a mostly red wine blog) on the night of July 30th 2011 because brother Darin said I should.. .
In August I created Rhine Country (BotBot’s sister site blogging white wines) , and Nedonna (a general family blogging portal). I also started MoVal Me (a more intimate Moreno Valley restaurant review blog), and finally now in September I’m starting BotJot [Bottom Bottle Jotting] a personal journal mostly for myself as a way to log my blogging development, experiences, discoveries, thoughts and ideas.
I love the way BotBot (Bottom Bottle) came out. It’s got a nice slick look and smooth well developed feel to it using nothing but google’s blogger design materials. It’s not fancy really, but works pretty well. Rhine Country is also made using nothing but google’s blogger boogers!
MoVal Me was an attempt at getting into a less slick more organic blogging style. It turned out okay, obviously a lot less slick but not as organic as I had hoped. I wanted to just sit down and type but find myself still over editing my work. This blog (botjot) ends up being more organic than any of the others.
Nedonna was a bit of a hard but fun undertaking and was constructed so I could practice designing a site using content (a picture I shot), shape and illustrate and publish it as background imagry while concentrating on some better blog linking issues, other photo/album design and site structure elements, and using some of ‘blogger’s’ cool blog-ready gadgets.
BotJot was an afterthought. I have been keeping some personal notes as I start down my blogging road. I see that one of the intrinsic advantages of blogging is that writing-out a blog automatically archives and formats your daily/weekly/monthly diary entries. Even if you don’t publish your work for the world to see, it’s a great way to keep it linear and sorted for your own self interests. I stumbled on GrooveShark and have been hooked hard ever since. It’s is an internationally private online music search engine, music streaming service, and music recommendation web software application, allowing users to search for, stream music for free. It’s best feature is your ablity to create and label personal playlists, and then export those “widgets” to your blog rather easily. One of the playlists I made for fun in GrooveShark uses James Bond 007 theme songs. So, instead of making BotJot a boring black & white static blog (like I could even do that) I simply carried over my Grooveshark 007 theme to my BotJot page design. I downloaded a image still of the opening credits sequence to Casino Royale, plugged in a GrooveShark widget and Bang! I think it looks pretty cool and was pretty quick and easy to design now—six weeks and several blogs later!
Though I don’t pretend to know anything but the fundamentals about google’s blogger, and still have a lot to learn, I’m getting my first whiff of better bloggin interface and web design sites like wordpress and expression engine. I have a nervous feeling that someday I’ll be wanting to export (and greatly upgrade) my work in greener pastures. Blogger has been a intresting challenge though and I’d recommend it for anyone interested in a starting point to web log site design and creation.
