Tag Archives: blogging

7 years of daily blogging

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Yesterday marked my 7th anniversary of writing a daily blog. I ended the original post that started this streak saying,

“I’m not getting younger and more than ever, NOW is the best time to start.

I tried over a decade ago, now I’m going to do it – a short daily blog.” ~ Daily-Ink, July 6, 2019

It wasn’t quite 10 years earlier, the idea for Daily Ink was actually attempted September 29, 2010. I was living in China and had purchased a leather bound book and decided that I’d write in it, take a picture of what I’d written, and post it on a blog which I changed addresses from datruss.davidtruss(.com) to daily-ink.davidtruss(.com).

In the original ‘first post’ I explained:

“The title ‘Daily Ink’ is inspired by Stephen Downes “Ol Daily” and his “Half an Hour” that he attempts to decticate to writing each day… and to my former student Kris Bradburn whose blog is cleverly named “Wanderng Ink”.

I stopped reading the Ol Daily for a while but Stephen has started sharing it on LinkedIn, and I’m back to reading it again. Also, just a couple days ago Kris’ substack blog arrived in my email. It’s wonderful to see the two original inspirations for my blog title still blogging.

Although it took almost a decade to make it happen, once I committed, I committed. How much longer will I go? I’m honestly not sure. What I do know is that I’m not ready to break the streak. The reward of writing every day exceeds the effort. Like I say in my byline:

“Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.”

And so my Daily-Ink will keep getting inked for a while longer…



 

Open Thinker

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I just realized that this past March marked 20 years of blogging for me. And so I checked my post count. I have 357 published posts on Pair-a-Dimes and 2,640 here on Daily-Ink (2,641 when I post this:). That’s just shy of 3,000 posts total.

What made me notice this is that I looked at my LinkedIn profile after someone commented on my post there. At the end of next month I’ll be retired from the school board and another ‘job’ will move up to the top of my ‘Experience’ column. It will be “Open Thinker”. Somewhere around 15 years ago I added this job to LinkedIn, and put the start date as the first month of my first blog post, March 2006.

It’s hard to believe that I’ve been openly sharing my thoughts for that long. Just yesterday while chatting with my oldest she told me she was sharing the size of my digital footprint with a new friend. We discussed how I say, ‘my oldest’ and don’t regularly use her name because I don’t think it’s fair to her that if a future employer Googles her name, what would come up are dozens of her dad’s blog posts that include her name. Her openness online should not default to my choices to share. That said, I’m still on her first page if you search her name.

I’m not changing my open writing and sharing any time soon. And next month I’ll probably take a good look at my ‘Open Thinking’ experience description on LinkedIn and revamp it.

Blogging has changed over the years. At one point it was an engagement machine, I’d routinely get 8, 10, 12, even 24 comments on a post. Now I get Likes on my Facebook page and LinkedIn, where I share my posts, and occasionally I get comments. Most people who engage with my writing don’t go to my actual blog. That’s perfectly ok, my only disappointment with this is that comments on other platforms are not curated there the way comments are on a blog. Oh well… times change, tools change, use changes… but what hasn’t changed is that I’m still writing, and openly thinking, out loud on the internet.

Unzipping my lips

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After writing my last post, I recognized something that I haven’t thought about in a while. Being in a role as a principal of a public school, I’ve held a responsibility to ‘hold my tongue’. There are many blog post ideas I wanted to share but couldn’t. There are many points of view I would have loved to have expressed that I chose not to. I’ve had a responsibility to my position that has prevented me from being controversial.

Not too long ago I learned that a tiny reference to something that wasn’t even central to the point of a post I wrote was brought to the attention to one of my superiors. That person mentioned it to me, to make me aware, but did not ask me to change my post. I appreciated both the heads-up and the fact that I wasn’t asked to change anything I had written. In fact, I’ve never been asked to change my words on a blog post (though admittedly I was for both a Facebook post and a retweet many years ago).

While I’ve never been asked to change a blog post, I have on this blog, and my Pair-a-Dines blog, written posts that have ‘walked a fine line’, but I don’t think I’ve ever crossed that line. I didn’t cross that line in my last post either, but I did write something that could be interpreted as showing a patronizing attitude of superiority, with no real attempt at being humble. That’s not usually my writing style.

Reflecting now, I recognize that retiring and no longer having a role in a school, and a larger district, I am probably going to be able to be a bit freer in my choice of topics, and the stances I choose. No, I’m not going to be taking my metaphorical gloves off, but I am going to be able to unzip my lips a bit where I might have kept them zipped in the past.

I’m not sure how this will unfold yet, but at this moment I’m looking forward to being a little freer with my thoughts and ideas than I have been in the past… with less concern about my words misrepresenting others whom I might represent. Don’t expect instant controversy, but after retirement don’t be surprised by me being a little more loose lipped about things that I might have been more careful and cautious to share in the past.

Trying to rebuild old posts

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Yesterday after work, I fell into a bit of a rabbit hole. Apparently my ‘Subscribe by email’ button isn’t working on my blog and a relative asked me to add her to my subscriptions because hers was broken, and she was no longer receiving blog updates from me. I spent a bit of time looking at it, but even with AI help, I think I need to add a plugin to fix it and the first one I tried had an expensive subscription that I didn’t want to sign up for. After playing around for a bit, and then moving all my old ‘Pair-a-Dimes’ subscribers to Daily-Ink, (not fully realizing what I was doing), I decided to hold off on any more tinkering with subscriptions.

However, now I was on the back end of my blog and I realized that a post I was looking at had a related post with a broken image. So I clicked on the post, ‘Alan November: “Do learning”‘, and discovered that the image, probably a screen shot of a Tweet, was the point of the entire post, and I don’t have a back-up of it. It was an Alan November tweet, so I thought I’d go to X.com and find it, but Alan deleted his account and so now I have no idea how to fix this?  Essentially, the post is meaningless now, and there’s nothing I can do about it. That said, I will dig up my old laptop and see if I have it saved there as a last resort.

This happened because I used a proxy website, Posterous -now defunct, to be able to blog from my phone when I lived in China. However, as I meandered around my Daily-Ink blog I also found additional broken links. I was able to update 2 videos that were no longer available, with the same video at a different link. I also found references to other people’s blogs and those links are no longer working. I can’t do anything about this. Then I realized that I have shared a bunch of links with different link shorteners that are defunct. One of those is tr.im, which is also in a few of my old presentations. And there are a bunch of links across my blog where I used my own link shortener 2di.me (from my ‘Pair-a-Dimes’ blog days). I still pay to use this domain, but at $40 a year, just to maintain old links, it seems like a waste of money. But before I give it up, I think I’m going to do my best to find these links and update them with the full URL. That will take hours of time, but I have a plan to do it in the next year.

I don’t know when I’ll eventually give up my blogs and let them go the way of the dinosaur, but even these posts will disappear one day. What I’m surprised about is how many links to blogs I’ve referenced are already gone. Bloggers I admired and respected have let their blogs go, links to them just hit ‘404 – Not Found’ pages. Sometimes these links and broken images are not essential to the message I’m sharing, but other times what I shared loses its meaning without them.

It’s sad, but also not really worth worrying about. With over 2,500 posts now, all the broken links probably don’t add up to 2% of these, and in all honesty, nobody is seeking out Daily-Ink posts from over a decade ago. I’ll update what I can as a labour of love… and keep blogging. This too shall pass, but not yet. To misquote one of my favourite poems, ‘there’s miles to go before my blog sleeps’.

So, as a final thought, to those that subscribe, read on social media, and meander here occasionally, thank you for finding your way to my writing. I’ll do my best to keep this space tidy, with live links, and working images.

A new groove

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It wasn’t that hard getting up on Monday morning at 5am to get to the gym. Coming back from a two week break didn’t hurt that much. But getting back into the routine of writing before I got to the gym at 6am has been a struggle.

It’s almost 11pm now and I’m laying down on my couch rattling this off to keep a commitment to myself to write every day.

The thing I am most looking forward to with retirement is time to write. The idea that I can schedule writing time that isn’t rushed excites me. Not having to think up ideas on the toilet first thing in the morning, or while washing my face and brushing my teeth. Not having to edit my work while on a treadmill. Actually sitting at a laptop with a coffee in my hand rather than hunting and pecking away on my phone… these are things I can’t wait to do as part of a daily routine upon retirement.

Before the March break people would ask me if I’m excited about my pending retirement and I’d answer honestly that I haven’t thought much about it. Now, after the break, I can’t say that anymore. I am thinking about it. I’m wondering how to design my days? I’m looking forward to finding a new groove that doesn’t involve a 5am wake up time and rushing to get my whole routine done before starting a long day at work.

The real test will be next September, when everyone is back at work and I’m home. I’m confident that I’ll build a routine that works. I’ll find my groove.

Blogging Reader Revival

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I’m not ready to do it, but maybe someone out in the blogosphere can. Do you know what we need? A revival of Google Reader. Somebody with a paid version of a good AI coder needs to get on this. Build a version of Google reader but with some AI brilliance added in.

3 new features:

1. Have it learn from the reader. Whichever feeds the reader spends more time on gets priority in the feed.

2. AI summaries of the posts. The reader can choose from 3 levels, ranging from a one line summary to a detailed synopsis.

3. An audio reader option.

Make it free for up to 6 feeds, $6 a year for 20 feeds, or $12 a year for unlimited feeds. I’m sick and tired of apps gouging us for yearly fees.

So, who wants it and who’s going to build it?

Not if, when

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The only thing I use AI for when I write my blog is to make an accompanying image. I don’t use it for editing, and as a result I’ll often not notice a typo, or I’ll create a sentence that doesn’t flow, or I’ll repeat a word a little too frequently in a paragraph. What I’m saying is that I’ll make mistakes that could be caught if I used an artificial intelligence to aid in my editing.

That said, I already do use some AI because a little red line unner under a word lets me know I’ve misspelled it. We often forget that we’ve been using forms of artificial intelligence for a long time now. But I’m specifically talking about using AI as an editor or even as a co-writer. This is something I have not intentionally done yet. However, if I’m honest, the main reason for this is simply time.

I’m already pressed for time to get my writing done in the morning. I recently wrote about how frustrated I was with AI images, and the fact that they weren’t giving me exactly what I wanted, and wasted too much time. I don’t see myself in a position where I’m going to spend time using AI as an editor on top of this.… But it’s coming.

The reason it’s coming is because while I know writing every day has improved the quality of my writing, I’m sure it has also reinforced some of the weaknesses in my style. Doing something repetitively without meaningful feedback doesn’t necessarily make you better. I know that having an editor would make me better. And the reality is, I have an editor available to me whenever I want one. So now it’s just a matter of deciding when?

The ‘when’ is probably after retirement. I think that when I’m not trying to stick an entire routine of habits into under 2 1/2 hours before work, I’ll have time for things like putting my writing into an AI editor. I’ll probably be writing on my laptop instead of my phone, while enjoying a morning coffee. I’ll have the convenience of multiple tabs open on my browser rather than having to use my finger to copy paste information. And most importantly, I’ll have more time to learn, to get feedback and discern, does this AI suggestion make my writing better, or does it make my writing more vanilla?

The point is, it’s going to happen. To have a tool like this, literally at my fingertips and not to use it is silly. Especially when it can help me, with the right prompt, to become better at something I love to do.

Technical difficulties

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I’m surprised that the Jetpack app that I use to publish about 95% of my Daily-Ink posts is so buggy. I often hit ‘Publish’ then get an error. When that happens the post usually publishes anyway, but on the app my post stays in drafts. This can get very confusing.

Sometimes I update the draft and it moves to the Published tab, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s all very confusing. I would not be surprised if I have published the same post twice, thinking that an older post was just a draft I hadn’t completed. The whole process is very messy.

In fact, I was just trying to clean up some of the mess and ended up deleting two posts from a few days ago. I had to go into the Trash and restore them, then date them correctly to have them displayed in the right order on my blog.

I’m always intrigued how advanced our technology is and yet how often we have to put up with bugs and technical difficulties. Our TV doesn’t always work nicely with our cable box. We occasionally have to delete and reinstall streaming apps just so we can log into them. I consider myself pretty tech savvy, but I don’t watch a lot of TV and often give the remote to my wife to navigate… But when it’s time to reinstall the app, she hands it to me to assist. Shouldn’t all this be intuitive? Shouldn’t it all just work?

I wonder if this is going to get better or worse? As all our devices get more technical are we just going to have to face more technical difficulties? I’m guessing this will be the case. We are going to see more and more not-really-smart ‘smart devices’. The limitations of their smartness are going to create a lot more glitches, bugs, and technical issues. In the coming years we are going to see more rather than less technical difficulties.

It took almost 9 years

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15 years ago yesterday I started my second blog, this one called Daily-Ink. The plan was to write my ideas down on paper, in a leather bound book, and then photograph the page and upload it to the blog. I admitted in my first post that I held no promises because my previous attempt at taking a photo a day for a year failed. And sure enough, this idea didn’t last long.

It was September 28th, 2010, I was living in China at the time and starting my second school year there as principal of a foreign national pre-K to Grade 9 school. I did a few posts in my intended format then ended up using the blog when I wanted to share experiences and ideas that didn’t fit onto my Pair-a-Dimes for Your Thoughts blog, with the byline: Reflections on Education, Technology and Learning. I used Daily-Ink to track some articles I found interesting, comments I made on other blogs, to participate in a MOOC, and to record some travel experiences.

It was almost 9 years later, July 6th, 2019 that I decided I was actually going to write daily. I said on that day,

“I’m not getting younger and more than ever, NOW is the best time to start.

I tried over a decade ago, now I’m going to do it – a short daily blog.”

And here I am, 2,276 days later, still writing daily. So, whatever it was that you were planning to do but didn’t get around to it… it’s not too late. It’s not too late to write a book, to get in shape, to pursue a different career, or take up a new hobby. The years missed matter less and less once you actually get started.

Just keep blogging…

I came across this post, via a Facebook memory, which was posted 5 years ago today. ‘Journaling Out Loud’, in which I stated, “I’m sure there are some people that wonder, ‘why would anyone want to do this anyway?’ That’s actually not a bad question. For me, I love to write and I wasn’t doing enough of it. The self-created obligation to do so inspires me to make the commitment.”

And I also shared this quote,

“For years, I’ve been explaining to people that daily blogging is an extraordinarily useful habit. Even if no one reads your blog, the act of writing it is clarifying, motivating and (eventually) fun.“ ~Seth Godin

I think my total readership has gone down in the past few year. Social media shares used to get a lot of clicks but I don’t pay and I’ve noticed that organic visits to my posts have dropped dramatically… while I’m simultaneously seeing my feeds full of items from people who pay subscription fees. Membership has its privileges.

But I’m not worried about readership nearly as much as I am about the act of writing… as well as clarifying and developing my ideas. I take pride not in accolades but rather in commitment. I write Every. Single. Day. Some days are really hard. Many days I’m just going through the motions. But I hit that publish button every day.

I get to share my artistic expression, my imagination, my thoughts on interesting topics. I also keep my commitment to healthy living by frequently referencing my routines and challenges on my blog.

And sometimes the words just flow. They dance from my brain, to my keyboard, to the screen and say exactly what I want to say with just the right word choice. On those days I hit the publish button with delight. It doesn’t matter if this flow state comes to me once a week or once a month, that’s enough to remind me of why I journal out loud every day.

And so I’ll be back tomorrow. For now I’ll just end with my blog byline, shared in a post many years ago:

“Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.”