Saturday, August 2, 2008

Focusing a blog

When I began my blog To Write is to Dream I only wanted the blog to contain my poetry. My aim was to create a space where anyone could make their own mind up about each poem. This is another reason I rarely leave comments about the poems I post.

In the last month or so I ended up taking the extra information that on a few occasions I had added to a poem and pasting them as a comment. This means that it now appears like I have added some comments after the fact. Maybe down the track I will add a note to explain that the comment actually happened earlier (I will just have to wait and see).

As for other people's comments: when someone comments about the structure then I simply take a look and I make change if I agree with them. I believe the comment that someone has left will help others figure out the changes I have made. There has only been one occasion that a comment left me rethinking a whole poem. Initially this was titled Touch, which then became Touch (revised) and both are on my poetry blog. I am still not completely happy with the results so there may be a new revision sometime in the future. However, you will not find the comment on the blog as it was made in another location where I feed my poetry blog to. I will go into feeds in another post.

Why decide to focus my blog only on my poetry? Well I have noticed that blogs can end up being about many things and when that occurs they become hard to use. The added bonus to this sort of focus is when I added things like a cloud tag this only lists the keywords that describe the topics of each poetry. These keywords are a form of commentary, but are needed to allow a reader to pick and chose the topic of a poem they read.

The main thing I wanted to avoid is becoming a person who starts a blog and then lets lapse and I know many people who have done just that. The biggest bonus of this whole experience is the only writers block I have had in the nearly 2 years I have been working on To Write is to Dream is poetry blocks.

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