Isabelle Disraeli

It's been a little over a week since joining Dreamwidth, and all in all I am pleased with the platform and am excited to be in what really feels like a fandom community! Tumblr always felt a little like taking a walk on a busy street, tons of people around but rather lonely.

 

One thing I am jazzed about today is that I have finally gotten the backlog of posts from Tumblr all scheduled on my WordPress blog. This last summer, completely ignorant of the changes coming to Tumblr, I was introduced to WordPress at a class at work. Well actually the class talked about a lot of different blogging platforms including Tumblr. When the teacher asked if any of us had blogs already, my ass that had been on Tumblr recommending slash fanfiction for four years was all "no I've never heard of this tumble thing you speak of". There are just some things co-workers don't need to know, y'know (especially if you live in the South [US]). Anyway, the teacher showed us her blog (all about her grands and the BBQ recipe she just tried) and I was instantly interested in the fact that WordPress kept stats on views, not just likes or reblogs. (You can also see what country the view originates from, there is a little map of the world and the country lights up with a view from there and it's flag appears below. I feel like I've really brushed up on my geography ;D)

 

Recommendation sites or blogs are quiet places in my experience, occupying an almost liminal space between original content and a straight reblog of someone else's content. I've been on the other side of this for years, ghosting onto rec sites, mining them for the good stuff, and than moving on without a word. I begrudge no one this experience. But I had already grown tired of Tumblr's setup from a social interaction standpoint so I thought it might be nice if I could at least see that people were indeed even looking at what I had worked on. So I signed up for a free WordPress account and started to feel out how I wanted to do this thing.

 

I don't know if I've said that I work at a public library, but I know I've not said that I took a degree in Graphic Design. I dusted off my rusty skills and set about decorating my new blog with graphics and I find myself quite pleased with the appearance of the thing especially with my limited means. I say blog but WordPress allows you to build a blog/website hybrid and so far it has been a good experience from the graphics/organization/stats side of things. 

 

One major drawback about WordPress is that it is not a Fandom Space. Well at least not a transformative fandom space (like Dreamwidth or Tumblr) but more of a curative fandom space with blogs reviewing movies and books. Oh the book review blogs, there are so many of them and in various flavors. I'm not saying I've not met a few nice folks and had some nice interactions, but this did not turn into the kind of fandom experience that I had been looking for though I certainly have no plans to take it down or stop posting there mostly because I really am quite pleased with how pretty it is (I'm bragging and no one has to agree, but I'm proud). 

 

So now we finally get back around to my subject line, I'm now looking at maintaining into the new year three blogs running concurrently on Tumblr, WordPress, and Dreamwidth all of them functionally different and I begin to wonder if I am perhaps in too many places and trying to maintain too many sites at once. Dreamwidth is non-negotiable as this is the place that I'm finally found the kind of interactive fandom experience that I've been looking for, but WordPress and Tumblr both have their pros and cons. I guess for now it's best to just try to make a go of it, I certainly have time to change my mind later. :)

 

In other doings, I have SO much Christmas stuff to get done this weekend and though I am well on my way to recovery from my cold this last week . . . it's rainy, I hate shopping, I hate wrapping, I HATE going to the post office, and I don't wanna adult. *pouts shamelessly* *sigh* I'm just going to have to put on my big girl pants and do it anyway, which I guess is the definition of adulting.

 

If you're still here, thank you for reading my ramblings. Oh and I've also made inroads in getting my previous recs up on this site, I've logged them back to July. Please go have a look :D.