Pablo Fernandez

Tag: blogging

  • Fiction blogging

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    As stories can be told in first person, or third person, in the form of a diary or a tale, as book or comic or movie; I was thinking that blogging could be a literarly style as well.

    I can think of two sub-genres. Historic and fantastic blogging.

    For historic imagine a blog written in the context of -70 (minus 70) years. So that on October 19th 2009 you’d get a post for October 19th 1939. Who would be the blogger? It could be an important person, what would Churchil blog? Or it could be an unnamed person, an anti-nazi frenchman for example. They could also have a Twitter account! It would be an interesting way to learn history.

    The other genre would be total fantasy. A blogger in the future, imagine if for some strange reason, blog posts of a guy surviving the singularity travel back in time? What if blog posts from a galaxy far away? I would certainly follow those blogs! But of course, it’s hard work that requires a very good writer.

    Another thing that could be applied to any fictional blogging is having a network of blogs. Imagine reading the blogs of a frenchman in the resistance, a nazi soldier, a Russian red-army member. All blogging about the same, from different perspective! What about reading the Twitter feeds of Frodo, Sam, Gandalf, Aragorn, Saruman?

    I think it would be very entertaining.

  • Reviewers in a WordPress blog

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    In an effort to increase the quality of this blog I’ve engaged a couple of friends in reviewing my posts before they go out. I’m after typos, grammar and also “Are you serious? are you going to publish that crap?” or “You are going to get into trouble with that”.

    The best way to do this, in my and in the opinion of many, is to let the reviewer modify the post freely and then check the diff. I suppose we are too used to work with source code, where diffs are a necessity.

    I was positively surprised that WordPress can provide very nice colored diffs between each save of each post. Praise to WordPress! I was also surprised, but negatively, that WordPress doesn’t have a reviewer role. Users with the reviewer role would be able to edit unpublished posts but wouldn’t be able to modify published posts or publish drafts.

    I was pointed to Role Scope, an amazing plug in for WordPress. I spent an hour creating a group and trying to give it the proper access, and as that failed, trying to limit the Editor role to only edit drafts. I failed at that too.

    When I gave up and I went back to the usual blogging I found that Role Scoper allows you to give edit access to each post to any user. And that’s it. That’s what I’m using. Whenever I want something reviewed I give access only to that post to the user I want to review it. Quite simple.

    Reviewed by Daniel Magliola. Thank you!

  • Being a prolific blogger

    Recently my friend Juanjo pointed out how much activity my blog has been having recently. Thinking about it, he is right and there are two reasons why this may be the case:

    • I’m more inspired than usual. I’m not sure if this is the case, and even if it is, it’s not helpful for me to communicate it unless I’ve found a way to find inspiration easily.
    • I’m writing in parallel. Now this is something to talk about, because it is a technique that can be applied by everyone and I recommend to any blogger.

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