Thursday, March 27, 2014

Comments? How I've chosen this year.

WRITE. Every day in March write a slice of life story on your own blog. SHARE. Link your post in the comments on each daily call for slice of life stories here at TWT. GIVE. Comment on at least three other slice of life stories/blogs.

The question of how to choose whose Slices to comment on has been going around. I have done it very differently this year than in years past.

I visit the Two Writing Teachers site, click on the link to that day, and start scrolling. I then pick out the first handful of Blogger posts I see. I read and comment and then write my Slice, post it, and link. Today is the 27th day I have done it this way.

Two interesting things to note about this method.

1) Why am I only choosing Blogger?

Here is the short version. After being frustrated many days during March's challenge last year I devised this plan.

The slighter longer version goes like this. I am part of an online community that requires I have a Wordpress account. When it was setup I didn't know that giving my Gmail address would be one of my biggest regrets. The rest of my online identity is linked to the Google world. If I try to comment on a Wordpress account it becomes complicated to keep my identity without it being tied to that realm of my life. (Yes, Two Writing Teachers is a Wordpress site and I have just had to resign myself to having to use my Twitter handle, but you get a monster avatar instead of a picture, etc.)

2) How is it working? Do I feel like I am always bumping into new people?

The interesting thing is that I have done my writing at the end of my day and since I tend to sit down at about the same time each day (as do others) I have had some consistency. It does have a different feel though. There are still people I have connected with through this community over the years and their posts go into my feeder. They will get comments from me after I have made it through March. The March challenge has grown so much, and I wasn't even around for the first couple of years!

I figure I will keep this method for the next four days, but who knows what I will cook up for next year.

5 comments:

  1. Interesting! I have a wordpress account and sometimes have trouble commenting on other sites. I usually pick the wordpress ones. Hmmm….

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  2. It is funny how so much in life comes down to Coke or Pepsi, cassette or 8-track, Apple or Android...and now Wordpress of Blogger. I went Blogger several years ago because we were becoming a Google-oriented school and it just made sense to try it if I wanted my kids to use it.

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  3. Wouldn't it just be nice if all the blogging platforms got together and agreed to play nicely with each other? I suspect most people are not product or platform specific. We have a little of everything in our house. I wish they would all work together seamlessly. I've done a variety of things when commenting this year.

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  4. I use Blogger too, and a lot of my "Wordpress friends" have difficulty commenting and sometimes viewing my page. Thus, I find myself out of the loop on occasion. I don't plan on moving my blog, so this is where I will stay.....:-)

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  5. Hi, I use Google too, but I have a Wordpress acount and blogsite. I just put up links to my blogger post and Repress other's posts. It seems to be working for me. Glad you popped by my site and we got to connect. Thanks. ;)

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