This-n-That

One thing I'd like to play with is the trackback feature.

This new blog is creating a huge number of errors for my site. Not surprisingly, I'm getting tons of 404-File Not Found messages, almost entirely from robots who are looking for my archived entries. Wordpress keeps them all in a tidy database, but I guess the robots were used to finding them where they used to be. I wonder how efficient it was to index all those old entries each time, and what led them to it in the first place.

Which brings up something about the old Greymatter program I really miss. I used to be able to look at access logs for the blog, and I don't think Wordpress has that anywhere. I could see who was going where and doing what, and now I can't. Sure, this looks and acts much better, but I may need to look around and see if there's a plugin or something that will tell me what's going on.

Also, today (for the first time!) I'm trying (with this entry) to create an "extended entry." With any luck, there should be a "...more..." tag following this paragraph. I used to use that to talk about writing, but maybe I'll just have to put my writing stuff into a cleverly-named category. I wonder how many people pay attention to categories...



Now about writing...

I got a brainstorm yesterday, one I should have received years ago.

I've been a trifle unhappy lately about my writing. No matter how much re-writing I do, I don't get the result the want, prose that looks as if it was written by an expert. What occurred to me yesterday is that my writing is my writing.

I've never been big about worrying my "voice," but that's what it comes down to. I have a certain style, a way of putting things, that's natural. It's how I've learned to write. No amount of tweaking will generate writing that's different (not unless I consciously, I guess, work at it), and it's been a fool's quest for me to re-write hoping for that.

If my writing is pleasing, I should concentrate more on making it better not making it different. There may be some people who like how I write, and it's to those that I should concentrate my efforts. Sure, I may later produce heady, heavy works or thrilling adventures, but they'll still have been written by me and my style should be pretty much the same no matter what I write.

So, maybe, what I should be working on is producing more.