Snoskred – Life in the Country

Aussies reading this, I need your input and comments. Recently during my blogging chicks commenting challenge, I found myself breaking my own commenting rules. Specifically – “If you’re seeing red, get out of there fast – and as politely – as possible”.

A very judgmental blogger had stated that they would not read a blog if it contained swear words, and stated that they felt anyone using swear words basically was a bad writer incapable of expressing themselves in any other way. Them’s fighting words to an Australian – at least they were to me.

Living here in Australia I hear swear words all the time, it’s a fact of life. There is not one single word that shocks or offends me. Not even the C word. In fact I know people who use that as a term of affection. If one was offended by these words, you would probably find life quite difficult here in this country – Aussie readers, do you agree?

At the same time I have recently changed the way I do things here at the blog with regard to swear words. I put a * in them. This is something I do for the readers, not for me. That is because I do understand that some people are offended by these words.

So over the past few days while I have been cleaning my bookshelves (a job I finally finished) what this blogger said has been bugging me. I’m not going to link to the blog because I do not feel she deserves the traffic.

To write off everything a person says because of the occasional swear word? Isn’t that akin to writing off everything a person says because they are {insert one of the following – black, white, yellow, pink, gay, lesbian, heterosexual, republican, democrat, right wing, left wing, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, is my point made or should I continue?}. So I am a “swearer”. So I am going to hell. Or something. That doesn’t mean I am somehow “lesser” or my words have any less meaning.

I won’t lie to you guys (and Christian readers, please do not be offended by this, read the whole thing before you get upset) – I have struggled with this commenting challenge. First of all, it’s the blogging *chicks* and I’ve had some really terrible experiences with women during my life time. So the reality is, women scare me. Mostly. And I say that being female myself.

The other thing I have struggled with – many of the blogs belong to people who are Christian. I have always been somewhat scared of the apparently very religious after some bad experiences with the religious in my teenage years. The Christians I have known have never acted like true Christians – they preach, but do not *practice*.

I used to be Baptist. I used to go to church. The trouble was, the church I went to was more like a social group with cliques and some of the people were extremely nasty. It put me off church and Christians so much that I’ve never gone back. Since then I have often felt people who believe in God are as alien to me as people who believe UFO’s are coming to the earth to collect them.

I respect the right of everyone to worship whoever they choose, don’t get me wrong, but I do find it difficult when people are very judgmental and impose their religious views on others, especially in the areas of topics like a politics, sexuality, a womans right to choose, and the worst of all in my opinion, the religion where parents refuse to let their very ill children have blood transfusions which would save their lives. It’s an alien concept to me that you could care more about a religion than your flesh and blood child who is dying in front of your eyes.

I had a moment of panic at the start of this challenge when I opened up the first 10 blogs and the majority of them were Christians. But I’ve stuck with the challenge because I have found points of commonality with the people – even with the Christian people, several of whom I have now added to my google reader. Had you asked me at the start of this challenge would I be able to find Christians worth adding to my google reader, the answer would have been NO. Probably with a swear word in front of NO, too.

There’s blogs on the Australian Blogs Community that I struggle with because they have a very different point of view on some topics to what I do. I’m still willing to hear what they have to say. I listen to people who consider themselves left wing and right wing. I am incredibly tolerant in so many areas. Even I am surprised by how tolerant I am, from time to time.

What I have trouble tolerating are people whose minds are closed – who won’t listen to others and who will never change their opinion even when evidence suggests they should. This is why I have trouble with people who identify themselves as “right wing” or “left wing” when it comes to politics, because they seem to blindly support one side or the other. I’m a person who supports the side that is *right* and that means I can swing from one wing to the other in a heartbeat.

My blog has 5 hits for the F word on Technorati. Google comes up with 23 but it counts several of these more than once. If that negates everything else I have ever said here on the blog for some people, then so be it.

As I go back through my posts I will be editing swear words to have * in them. I apologize to any readers who may have been offended by my using these words in the past, and I do intend to use * in them in the future. It’s not because of that very judgmental blogger, it’s because I do respect and care for my readers and I do not want to impose my swearing on them. I know not all of them come from a place where the F word is as common as hello.

Sephy posted on this topic today also, these two posts tie in quite well together.

I meant to write about interpretation today but it didn’t happen. Maybe tomorrow I’ll get my act together on that one.

Wow, it’s been a busy week here. Just a few bits of housekeeping and an art update.

As far as the commenting goes, I’ve decided to take my time with it because after going through just 25 blogs, I’ve added 5 excellent ones to my google reader. These are – :: adventures in daily living ::: – A Blogspate – A Day in the Life of….. – Life Under the Sun – A Green Earth (note this last one has some gorgeous art on it) – and these have now all been added to my sidebar as well. Link love for ya’all.

So you might be wondering what makes me add a blog to my google reader? 95% of the time it is because the blogger has “it” – it being a mysterious thing that makes me want to know more about them and read more about them.

What are some of the annoying trends in the blogging world that I have picked up after just 25 blogs? There seems to be a new plug in where you hover over a link and it pops up a preview box. This sounds nice in theory but it makes everything go very slow here on my system, and to be honest is just really annoying. If I want to click on a link, I’m going to click, I don’t need a preview. It also seemed to make those blogs very slow in loading, to the tune of anywhere between 2-5 minutes. I think it’s called snap or snapshots. Say no to it, bloggers. It seems to be evil.

In other blogging trends, you may have noticed a trend towards “monetize your blog”. I’ve been to some blogs with more ads than blog content. That’s not going to happen here, however.. I did get contacted and asked to put some links on my sidebar, which I was paid for. That money has gone toward an important new project which I can’t announce yet. Believe me I am hanging out to launch it, so as soon as I can say anything I’ll let you know.

Once that happened I looked around a bit and found out about Text Link Ads which you might want to check out. See sponsors over there in the sidebar? That’s my text link ads. It works on an RSS feed, and the text link ads people set a rate for your blog (which you can change if you’re not happy with it) – you can have full control over the ads if you like, and it isn’t going to buy you a BMW or anything but, it is a handy bit of spare change. Enough to buy me a couple of DVD’s a month and that’s only with two links there. It’s not obtrusive, it’s not annoying, it’s not something flashing on the sidebar, and MOST important it’s not paid per click – you get paid whether people click or not. We work hard on our blogs and if an advertiser wants to pay to have a link on them, why not say yes?

WordPress blogs look fantastic. Sephy and I have been considering setting one up for some time now to try it out and play with it, so we did. On closer inspection it seems to be some kind of elaborate scam to get people to pay money for things blogger does for free. I could be wrong about that and WordPress people don’t line up to hit me over the head with things, but it seems like everything costs money, even down to how much space you get for your blog unless you want to host a wordpress on your own space – which you also have to pay for. Blogger does this for free we’ve got it good blogger people. If you’re using WordPress can you take a moment to comment on how it all works?

I’m seriously considering a blog template change. I’m not in love with what I have now however it is functional and it works. Elaina from A New Adventure – a blog I really loved the title bar design of – dropped by in yesterday’s comments with a few tips on how I can make the title bar bigger. If I can get a larger picture up there that might be enough to make me happy. I don’t like that the images have to be so thin.

While in keeping you up to date mode, I currently have many art works in progress. You can click on any of the photos for a bigger view. In this picture you can count 9 paintings in progress. You can see 5 stacked on top of each other – the pink one completes the set of 5 which I am doing as cardboard dragging. I’m going to take some pics of how that’s done so that I can write a post about it. You guys out there might be inspired to do some works of your own. It is so simple. Here’s a close up of the pink one, which I am seriously crazy about already and this is just the base coat. The painting below is the final completed version of the painting for my nephew, which had just been freshly sealed when I took the shot so the flash reflected a little. There’s nothing white on the painting. I asked you guys for opinions on this 69 days ago, wow, how time flies!So what am I up to for the rest of the day? I have to cook dinner, I am going to watch some West Wing, comment on a few blogs, and most important of all, look at some hotel packages in Sydney. This month is my Birthday month and Mum is going to pay for us to visit Sydney for a weekend (or midweek might be better value, because I am not my sister) and also IKEA. YAY! I’m seriously writing a huge list of things I want to get there. Laundry Baskets are number one on the list right now, followed closely by AA batteries. They had packs of 10 AA’s for $2 and they last for ages, and my cordless mouse chews up batteries and spits them out. Yes, I mouse too much.

I saw a hotel package which includes 30 minutes in a flotation tank. I’d love to try that. It’ll probably be somewhere in the CBD and I’ll take my camera and take heaps of pictures. We might get to the zoo but I’d like to hang out at Darling Harbor and go back to Sydney Aquarium myself – looking at fish without a snorkel. I don’t know if we’d have time for both. For those of you who have never been to Sydney, Darling Harbor is just incredible. There’s no describing it.

A few days ago Sephy pointed my attention to a post (Call for Guest Posters at Freshblogger) at Freshblogger, a blog which I am a huge fan of – the pretty to look at color scheme and title bar graphic in my favourite for the internet shade of green – as well as the content. I thought maybe I could write a semi-decent article about commenting challenges, and so I did, and it got published there today. It’s not a bad article even if I do say so myself. You can take a look here –

Challenging Yourself to Comment at Freshblogger

And of course if you would like to inspire people reading your blog to comment it might be worth linking to the article. Thanks to Ray from Freshblogger for putting my article up.

It’s been a pretty busy day here at Chalet Snoskred – and cold, too. We just got home from shopping and there’s a huge misty fog happening. I’m just going to cook dinner and then settle in to do some commenting and take some screenshots for a post I’m writing soon. My to do list right now is longer than you’d believe but I hope to get some commenting done today.

If you’re new to my blog, have a look around. I’m going for a “longest sidebar in the history of the blogging world” type of look, but a lot of the stuff there is somewhat relevant to me, some of my scambaiting, some of my previous posts with info about me, a lot of blogs I read, and some nice photos too.

I’m going to set myself the challenge of visiting all the blogs in the blogging chicks network, and commenting on as many as I can. I recently joined the network and I can’t wait to get into reading through the blogs on it. You can see the list of blogs in my sidebar. If you’re a chick you should join.

Also, I’ve finally finished adding the blogs I read in google reader to my sidebar. This means I now have some organisation going on here people! And one of the new things I am implementing is a “new blogz” folder in google reader. When I find a new blog I like, I’m adding it to that section and commenting to people that I’ve added them to my google reader. Hopefully depending on the amount of time I have, once a month or so I will go through and add them all to my sidebar.

It might seem like I’m a slave to reading blogs if you look at the amount of blogs there. The truth is quite different. I’m a really fast reader. I always have been. On average it takes me 2 hours to read a book of average size. So when it comes to blog reading, I turn up here with my coffee in the morning and I whiz through 100+ blog posts in the space of half an hour. Any ones I want to comment on (and this is becoming more and more lately) I open them in a new tab. Once I’m done with coffee, I spend a little time commenting, then it’s off to other tasks for the day. From time to time during the day when I have completed a task, I reward myself by checking in on any new blog posts. Not all of the people on the list blog daily, some of the people on the list blog once or twice a month.

The best new thing I’ve been involved with recently has been the Australian Blog Community. I love the RSS feed because it gives you the first 250 characters of a post and if that interests me, I right click and read the rest. I am really enjoying it, and I also am reading the US Blog Community which was set up by Sephy. If you’re in either of these countries and you have a blog, why not join the communities? If you’re elsewhere, why not make one for your country?