gensaku Posted February 12, 2021 Share Posted February 12, 2021 Hi. I just started a blog https://sashakyria.wordpress.com/ and any advice would be welcome. I'll post my first picture here to help if you don't want to visit the link. Thank you in advance. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Doc Carling Posted February 13, 2021 Share Posted February 13, 2021 (edited) Cute picture. As for your blog. You must be aware of the situation on web. There are already countless of blogs related to Second Life. Your blog has to compete with them. With some text on a white page you won't attract visitors, needless to mention. You are using wordpress. On web you can find many good looking wordpress blog templates for free. I think wordpess offers a defeault blog template also. I wonder why you didn't install it. Perhaps you don't know how to do that? Well, that is not explained with a few words. My advice would be, if you want to show your pictures on web, Flickr might be the better alternative. Many SL resident have a Flickr site. Those sites are easy to manage and offer many interesting features which allow you to present yourself and communicate with visitors. If you want to have such features in your blog, you had to find out where to get them on web and to install them by yourself. And don't think that you get them all for free. Anyway, building a blog can be fun, but at the same time it is hard work. If you want the fun, but not the work then take a look at Flickr. It is your decision of course. Good luck. Edited February 13, 2021 by Doc Carling 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Skell Dagger Posted February 13, 2021 Share Posted February 13, 2021 1 hour ago, Doc Carling said: Your blog has to compete with them. With some text on a white page you won't attract visitors, needless to mention. You are using wordpress. On web you can find many good looking wordpress blog templates for free. I think wordpess offers a defeault blog template also. I wonder why you didn't install it. Perhaps you don't know how to do that? Gensaku is using a custom Wordpress theme. It's called Seedlet. A quick right-click examination of the blog's source code gave me that info. @gensaku Your theme is nice and simple - clean and uncluttered - which puts the reader's focus on your images, which are nice and bright. Will the strong sharpened image style for the first (and featured) image be your style for that part of the blog going forward? Finding a specific style for your blog and/or image edits to show readers that "hey this is a post by Gensaku!" is a great tool for general recognition in the very saturated community of SL bloggers. One thing I will suggest, and that's not to repeat the featured image at the top of the post. When you click into the post itself it's not as noticeable, since the featured image is nice and big, whereas the embedded version after it is a smaller size. But when you view the blog from the main page (the link that you gave us here) you just see two identical images of the same size. Just keeping the featured image version would prevent that repetition. Thumbs-up for the linked credits list, too! Be aware that the free version of Wordpress only gives you a set amount of image hosting space (2GB, as I recall) so having your images being large PNG files is using up much more of that space much more quickly. Using any image editor to save the files as high quality JPG files will halve the file size without sacrificing the quality (at least, relative to the size that your theme loads them). I downloaded your header image and resaved it as a 99% quality JPG, and you can see the file size difference below: Doc's suggestion of a Flickr account is a good one. There is a thriving community of SL photographers on Flickr, and hundreds of SL creators have groups on Flickr where you can submit your images featuring their products. That will all get your blog out there a little bit more. You can also use Flickr to host your images for the blog, if you find yourself running out of Wordpress storage space. Free Flickr accounts can have 1,000 images hosted there. You can also put a link to your blog in your forum signature, and while you're at it why not also apply to join the SL Blogger Network and see if you can get your posts featured on the SL Community News pages? Best of luck going forward with your blog 2 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gensaku Posted February 13, 2021 Author Share Posted February 13, 2021 Thank you both. I'll try some improvements, I'm really just testing things to see how to work. I have a Flickr account, I don't use a lot, but I plan on being more consistent from now on. Thanks for the advices! 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josephine Carissa Posted February 13, 2021 Share Posted February 13, 2021 Greetings gensaku, I'm NOT a blogger just a visitor : ) what a like about your blog is that it is "clean & simple".....nice start i'll be visiting : ) Have a great day, Josephine 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gensaku Posted February 13, 2021 Author Share Posted February 13, 2021 8 minutes ago, Skell Dagger said: Will the strong sharpened image style for the first (and featured) image be your style for that part of the blog going forward? I like this, but I'm not sure if it's good, or if people aprove this kind of image. I really don't know if I continue this way or not. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Skell Dagger Posted February 13, 2021 Share Posted February 13, 2021 1 minute ago, gensaku said: I'm not sure if it's good, or if people aprove this kind of image The first part is your decision to make. So is the second (bolded by me) part. By all means seek advice, but don't seek approval from others regarding how you edit your images or run your blog. It's your blog, and your creative playground. You get to set the rules and decide how you 'play'. It may take you a while to settle into a style of images and writing that you like, or you may just chop and change as your mood desires. It's all good 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lillith Hapmouche Posted February 13, 2021 Share Posted February 13, 2021 Dunno if that's simple, uncluttered or just blank, but anyway... the sub headline for whole blog promises "a pink world". I'm not seeing that. Actually, I'm seeing two rose coloured fonts, but that's it. Anyway, good luck and all. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gensaku Posted February 14, 2021 Author Share Posted February 14, 2021 1 hour ago, Lillith Hapmouche said: Dunno if that's simple, uncluttered or just blank, but anyway... the sub headline for whole blog promises "a pink world". I'm not seeing that. Actually, I'm seeing two rose coloured fonts, but that's it. Anyway, good luck and all. Oh, no! By "pink world" I don't mean pink photos or pink background. My character is a baby girl, so I mean girly things, baby girl, barbie girl stuff. That's the meaning of pink in this subtitle 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Doc Carling Posted February 14, 2021 Share Posted February 14, 2021 6 hours ago, gensaku said: I like this, but I'm not sure if it's good, or if people aprove this kind of image. I really don't know if I continue this way or not. What Skell said. That's a decision you have to make. It depends also on what you want. Are you creating pictures just to enjoy yourself and not for an audience? Or do you want that your work gets public attention? In the last case you have to deal with many different tastes and favors. One thing is sure, you can't be everyones darling. That is a saying here and means no matter what you do, there will be always fractions which are fans of your work and others which are not. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MrsSeren Posted February 14, 2021 Share Posted February 14, 2021 Always make sure you enjoy and have fun with what you do, if it becomes stale and chore then ask yourself is it worth to keep doing? The image isn't my taste however I like your writing style but that just my personal taste on images, not a critique against you or your blog. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gensaku Posted February 14, 2021 Author Share Posted February 14, 2021 Thank you all for your kind help. I'm now using a new template, added some more information (links to flickr, about me page and so on). Now I'll play a little with picture styles until I find what I really like (I don't know much about Photoshop, I'm taking some lessons and probably it'll get better in the future. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Skell Dagger Posted February 14, 2021 Share Posted February 14, 2021 On 2/13/2021 at 10:22 PM, Lillith Hapmouche said: the sub headline for whole blog promises "a pink world". I'm not seeing that. Actually, I'm seeing two rose coloured fonts, but that's it. Well, my blog's tagline is 'Queer Eye from the Pixel Guy' but that doesn't mean I've got rainbow flags all over it In fact, I recently made the switch to a clean white theme, and I love it. It makes my images stand out much better. Anyway, I see that the OP has now changed to an all-pink theme, so your feedback has clearly been taken on board. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Doc Carling Posted February 15, 2021 Share Posted February 15, 2021 Looks already much better. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nalates Urriah Posted April 7, 2021 Share Posted April 7, 2021 I blogged and built up a viewership. I got advice when I started from New World Notes author Hamlet. I think his best advice was try for a 500 word or less post, include at least one picture. Write about something SL people are interested in. Be regular in your posts... once-a-day, three-times per week... whatever schedule. After about a decade I started to burn out. Now I post only when I feel like it. Dropping regularity has decreased the readership dramatically. Promote your blog, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook... 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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