I suppose this will be an occasional series, something like my one-time skirmishes into Wordless Wednesdays and Thursday Thirteens, both of which have long dropped by the wayside.
1) The Street Photography Now project started some time ago and I did originally join, but what with various other pressures I didn't seem able to keep up with the weekly instructions. I've decided to have a go, but at my own speed but rather than pick up the pace now from instruction 30, I thought I'd wind back to the start. I'll keep it as a background project.
2) The last time I did a Thursday Thirteen was probably two years ago, but I do still get hits on them from those still running a weekly list of thirteen items. I must admit I don't actively hunt for them but I suppose there's plenty of new distractions since the early days of blogging.
3) Wordless Wednesday is another similar example, where people would take photos, usually based around a theme and then comment on one anothers'. I still put an occasional picture up as a Wordless Wednesday but don't usually add all of the meta tags which means it won't get found in the way of my early experiments.
4) The changes to the social media platforms also change the time available for a single source such as a blog. I do still regard rashbre central as the core but with twitter, instagrams and all of the various noisy environments like myspace, facebook and so on it becomes a decision about how much to participate and where. I unhooked most of my automated feeds between blog, friendfeed, twitter and so on, because the echo of a post would ripple for two or three days.
5) The additional technologies for writing posts also have differing strengths. I actually consider the iPad to be more of a consuming device rather than one for creation. It's certainly fine for a few minutes of typing, but there are still limits in the editing compared with using a macbook or similar for authoring. When I've used it for writing, I tend to stick to a very basic format and then offload it to another Mac for clean-up.
6) Listlessly, I've remembered another phenomena with Thursday Thirteens. From many people they often turned into simple lists - like the top 13 pop tunes or similar. This was easy to author, but often had a cut and paste feel about it.
7) The next instruction from SPN in my case (Number 3) is "take a bus, do the weekly shopping, pop into a public loo" - I think some care might be required with at least part of that instruction.
8) Of course, part of my own blogging principle was to try to write a post every day, but to limit the time to post to about ten minutes. Somehow thats got me to about 2,580 posts and counting, although I realise that there are gaps where the tumble weed rolls across the page.
9) During this time, the underpinning technology of the blog
has had to deal with changes like the comment system shifting twice and a couple of the widgets I used for blogrolling friends and similar have gone belly-up. I keep meaning to further simplify the blog but again don't really have the time to ensure it would still work properly. I regards it as more about content than fiddling with html and javascript.10) Naturally I've seen other blogs come and go over the period of this one. The 140 character tweet is a significant factor in reduction, but I also remind myself of several sturdy blogs that predate mine and are still producing good content. I'll avoid the name check on this entry, which is now exceeding my ten minute rule.
11) With Easter approaching I'm still not sure which of the shop-made hot crossed buns taste best. I do like them to have some candied peel included and not to be just a current bun with a cross applied. Strangely enough, I generally find the plainer and less experimental ones are the best.
12) I realise I'm drifting away from the original focus of this post on Street Photography Now, as I started to include a full Thursday Thirteen. Another of my original blogging ideas was to try to mix two ideas together in posts.
13) So I'm not sure that this is a good Thursday Thirteen, nor a good Street Photography Now, but if I don't add any meta-tags, then no-one will be any the wiser.
