a year ago

today on the world famous busblog

how to blog by tony pierce, 110

1. write every day.

2. if you think youre a good writer, write twice a day.

3. dont be afraid to do anything. infact if youre afraid of something, do it. then do it again. and again.

4. cuss like a sailor.

5. dont tell your mom, your work, your friends, the people you want to date, or the people you want to work for about your blog. if they find out and you’d rather they didnt read it, ask them nicely to grant you your privacy.

6. have comments. dont be upset if no one writes in your comments for a long time. eventually they’ll write in there. if people start acting mean in your comments, ask them to stop, they probably will.

7. have an email address clearly displayed on your blog. sometimes people want to tell you that you rock in private.

8. dont worry very much about the design of your blog. image is a fakeout.

9. use Blogger. it’s easy, it’s free; and because they are owned by Google, your blog will get spidered better, you will show up in more search results, and more people will end up at your blog. besides, all the other blogging software & alternatives pretty much suck.

10. use spellcheck unless youre completely totally keeping it real. but even then you might want to use it if you think you wrote something really good.

11. say exactly what you want to say no matter what it looks like on the screen. then say something else. then keep going. and when youre done, re-read it, and edit it and hit publish and forget about it.

12. link like crazy. link anyone who links you, link your favorites, link your friends. dont be a prude. linking is what seperates bloggers from apes. and especially link if you’re trying to prove a point and someone else said it first. it lends credibility even if youre full of shit.

13. if you havent written about sex, religion, and politics in a week youre probably playing it too safe, which means you probably fucked up on #5, in which case start a second blog and keep your big mouth shut about it this time.

14. remember: nobody cares which N*Sync member you are, what State you are, which Party of Five kid you are, or which Weezer song you are. the second you put one of those things on your blog you need to delete your blog and try out for the marching band. similarilly, nobody gives a shit what the weather is like in your town, nobody wants you to change their cursor into a butterfly, nobody wants to vote on whether your blog is hot or not, and nobody gives a rat ass what song youre listening to. write something Real for you, about you, every day.

15. dont be afraid if you think something has been said before. it has. and better. big whoop. say it anyway using your own words as honestly as you can. just let it out.

16. get Site Meter and make it available for everyone to see. if you’re embarrassed that not a lot of people are clicking over to your page, dont be embarrassed by the number, be embarrassed that you actually give a crap about hits to your gay blog. it really is just a blog. and hits really dont mean anything. you want Site Meter, though, to see who is linking you so you can thank them and so you can link them back. similarilly, use Technorati, but dont obsess. write.

17. people like pictures. use them. save them to your own server. or use Blogger’s free service. if you dont know how to do it, learn. also get a Buzznet account. several things will happen once you start blogging, one of them is you will learn new things. thats a good thing.

18. before you hit Save as Draft or Publish Post, select all and copy your masterpiece. you are using a computer and the internet, shit can happen. no need to lose a good post.

19. push the envelope in what youre writing about and how youre saying it. be more and more honest. get to the root of things. start at the root of things and get deeper. dig. think out loud. keep typing. keep going. eventually you’ll find a little treasure chest. every time you blog this can happen if you let it.

20. change your style. mimic people. write beautiful lies. dream in public. kiss and tell. finger and tell. cry scream fight sing fuck and dont be afraid to be funny. the easiest thing to do is whine when you write. dont be lazy. audblog at least once a week.

21. write open letters. make lists. call people out on their bullshit. lead by example. invent and reinvent yourself. start by writing about what happened to you today. for example today i told a hot girl how wonderfully hot she is.

22. when in doubt review something. theres not enough reviews on blogs. review a movie you just saw, a tv show, a cd, a kiss you just got, a restaurant, a hike you just took, anything.

23. constantly write about the town that you live in.

24. out yourself. tell your secrets. you can always delete them later.

25. dont use your real name. dont write about your work unless you dont care about getting fired.

26. dont be afraid to come across as an asswipe. own your asswipeness.

27. nobody likes poems. dont put your poems on your blog. not even if theyre incredible. especially if theyre incredible. odds are theyre not incredible. bad poems are funny sometimes though, so fine, put youd dumb poems on there. whatever.

28. tell us about your friends.

29. dont apologize about not blogging. nobody cares. just start blogging again.

30. read tons of blogs and leave nice comments.

31. if you’re going to ripoff/mimic/be inspired by one blogger make it raymi, shes perfect.

from my book How To Blog + translated in russian + annotated + the toned-down version + en espanol
it won a bloggie + and over 150 people have linked to it over the past year, thanks everyone!

so whats the verdict?

1. was that good for you?
2. should i continue to allow trolls to troll here?
3. did dude provide anything to this blog?
4. did you learn anything from him?
5. was it entertaining?
6. do you feel dirty now?
7. do you forgive me for trying to be cool about it?

i will be at jury duty today, thurs, so its all yours, commentors. be good.

yes its true,

today i allowed myself to get caught up in a troll fiesta. and yes it is interesting that it happened just a day after the how to comment part three post of yesterday.

107. peter in ps

in the four years of the busblog, i doubt youve ever seen anything like it, here. probably because i would have never been able to participate in something like that unless i was, as i am now, unemployed. like our visitor probably is.

theres an old oriental saying that goes something like, dont argue with a madman because is someone walks past they wont be able to tell who’s crazy.

if youre concerned about being perceived as a madman id pay attention to that one if i were you. fortunately i dont have such hangups. im a fucking blogger, ive obviously thrown any hopes of looking cool out the proverbial window.

which in itself is ironic because, as alluded to below, the main reason i do this, and do it in public is to get chicks. plain and simple.

so if some unemployed hump in colorado wants to spend a few hours over here and say that his female friends have larger penises than me, fine. i’ll take his word for it.

so yes, most of keeping this blog going is to impress the ladies. but part of it is to provide an example for other bloggers, some of whom dont yet get the attention that mine does.

hopefully by keeping my comments open, writing all the time, and divuldging all my secrets, you too can have idiots infest your thingamabob.

but of course you will have idiots infest your shit. its inevitable. it doesnt matter if the pro in CO “started it” with an insulting link. it doesnt matter if my rebuttal to that link provided far more insight and constructive criticism than her slight or her champion’s defense. all that matters is people are going to come over to the busblog see 100+ comments and say wtf is going on here!

so since this week celebrates the year anniversary of how to blog, lets review what went down and have a quickie little how to handle trolls while i wait for two barely legals to drive me to malibu which im hearing might be tough to reach as pch (pictured, below) is closed.

a troll for those of you who arent hep is someone, usually a dude, unless youre jarvis, who sits around and tries to derail the discussion at hand with distractions having nothing to do with the topic of the post. the word troll comes from the mythical creature who sits under the bridge and pops out from the darkness to fuck up the day of the innocents who are just going about their business.

i think thats where it comes from.

trolls are sometimes interesting in very small doses but only if they are fast typers and predictable in their trolliness. if they stray from the stereotype they will usually ALL CAPS your ass and bail out.

what they want most of all is attention, which is interesting because they rarely have their own blogs. youd think that wouldnt be the case, but then again if they actually gave you something to compare against, they wouldnt be able to last long whilest trolling cuz their shit stinks which is why they leech off real blogs.

some trolls have blogs but never own up to having them. and Lord knows they wouldnt have open comments. think they want more people like them around trying to fuck up their shit? trolla, please.

cowards snipers and trolls love to hide in wait. but its cool. dont fear them, pity them and know what to expect.

they’ll jump on the most obvious things like your name or your style or your last post. its no different than a schoolyard tussle except no teacher is going to break it up once a crowd begins to grow.

if you give a troll enough rope he will hang himself with something really dumb. and if youre super lucky they’ll try to ignore their mistake and make another. todays troll made the unfortunate comment that his two female friends had larger penises than me. then later he talked about how he saw me on jerry springer with hermaphadites.

(how i was able to stand after that zing is a miracle. im sure you agree.)

the unusual sexual confusion this poor man is experiencing in the heat of the flame war was easy to ridicule, and far more telling on whats in his head than his complaints about my use of (or lack of) the shift key, his best attack.

the problem was instead of comparing the two blogs in question he went for the sucker play of trying to suggest that i was an uneducated, trailerpark livin redneck, who wrote poorly. and i had a little penis and a little ego.

any student of USENET knows that high school kids for years have been calling each other names on the web and they usually wind up either screaming about peoples mommas or about ones sexuality or cocksize.

since everyone knows that my dick’s so big and useful that i often type with it, as i am doing now, his attacks were ignored in deference to his ignorance. not ignorance as an insult, merely a lack of information.

so yes managing trolls involves a lot of ignoring, a tad of patience, large heaps of pity, and a keen eye thats always on the lookout for a pattern of weakness.

in todays case our troll has a thing about penises, and once he started posting a comment a minute, the best thing is to just let him keep running full steam at the red cape until he tires

and snorts some dumbass shit.

id love to go on but therye here. if you can learn some techniques through the thread below then it will have all been worth it.

surfs up!

the day i got my ipod + rosie gets hella comments + keezel + assclown junction

i could blog about blogging all day

which is why im gonna give you two posts in a row about our favorite web-based hobby.

recently i was asked how much i would charge to give a critique about a good-sized web site of a pretty large company.

i told them that i would analyze it and create a 6-8 page report worth of insight and links and i would follow it up by being available to them for a week so they could talk about the repot, ask questions, re-do things if they want on their site, edit or re-write parts of their site, and generally let them pick my brain for a week.

i had no idea what to offer as a quote, so i just figured id charge them what i got paid per week at my last gig. not a ton of money. reasonable enough, and i figured that if they needed me for an additional week it wouldn’t break em, and if they really loved me they could hire me fulltime and all would be good in the hood.

meanwhile in colorado…

a woman who fancied herself not only a writer, but an editor, And a consultant who is willing to travel worldwide to preach her masterful techniques on how to develop web content had linked my “how to blog” post.

that in itself is nothing new as i have been fortunate to receive high praise on that little puppy nearly every day since i posted it almost exactly a year ago.

however this particular writer/editor/trainer/ghostwriter/consultant didnt just link to my post, she editorialized underneath it by saying “Warning: A lot of bad, blithe advice lies on the other end of this link…”

say wha?

upon first glance at her page whose recent topics have included “Yes, Daily Blogging Really IS Usually a Bad Idea” i was all, im being punk’d im totally fucking being punk’d.

and i laughed and i laughed and i read on because who doesnt love to laugh?

shes linking to $200 Blogging “workshops” where they will teach you, among other things how to use “Technorati and Google to find existing Web pages on your topic and how to figure out their ‘permalinks'” (i guess if your retarded enough to pay $200 for a blogging seminar perhaps you really do need a tutorial on how to figure out the subtle mysteries of ‘permalinks’),

shes saying such nonsense like “Good writing results most consistently from clear thinking and lots of editing,” (even though pretty much every great song you’ve ever heard was written in less than 20 minutes, so says just about every successful songwriter, most of whom were stoned out of their gourd.),

and then of course she goes on and on and on and on about RSS feeds and Podcasting which is the tell-tale sign of someone who cannot write: they spend a huge portion of their days trying to figure out how everyone can subscribe to their brilliant feeds and hear their golden voices, instead of omg actually writing down some decent original content.

good writers don’t give a fuck about spelling grammar blogging seminars third drafts and rss feeds in their blawwwg and they sure as shit don’t care about podcasting, sorry ev and noah. writers write and those who cant podcast. prove me wrong. i double fucking dog dare you.

which isnt to say there isnt a place for podcasting and feeds and all the other accessories that blogging has been blessed with, but it has been my experience that if a blogger really truly can rock the keyboard, they don’t a)need to bother themselves with adam curry’s lifestyle b)get obsessed with RSS c)do very much else other than straight-up blog.

and those who suck at all of the above, consult, or worse, blatantly rip me off without the courtesy of a linkback

TL Pakki Pierce anyone?

anyways after a while it became apparent to me that she was actually sincere in her madness and so i clicked around a little on her site and at every page i laughed harder and deeper and wilder and stronger

until i got to her rate page for consulting companies on their websites via Site Critiques!!! my my my what a strange strange world we live in.

turns out our girl will look over your web site and give you a 4-6 page report for $600, 8-12 pages for $1,100, and 10-15 pages (the “gold package”) for, wait for it… $2,500!!!! and shes offering tick tock only thirty minutes of her precious time to explain her findings.

eureka.

here i thought i was pricing myself out of the market when all along i was selling myself cheap. plus i had discovered that i could be hawking typepad and teaching people to use technorati for two hundie a head.

adios amway, suddenly im in love with this woman.

thank you baby thank you!

not only had she instantly substantiated my rate but she gave me dozens of new examples of how not to create a blog.

first of all, don’t tell people not to write. thats like telling baseball players not to take batting practice or telling musicians not to practice. she says (im paraphrasing) “fine, write if you must, but don’t hit Publish every day. think about what your writing, edit the shit of it. hold everything precious. obsess over every t and each i.”

she calls herself worthy of a buck a word for a report and yet in the face of the fact that 9 out of 10 blogs dont make it to its year anniversary, shes going to advise people not to maintain the practice of writing at different parts in the day, multiple times a day, thereby building a following, which will help keep the blog alive?

and you also don’t tell that to people because at the heart of blogging is freedom and experimentation and the practice and throwing shit on the wall and seeing what sticks. its about exploring the new frontier not about overanalyzing last weeks ruminations. its not about keeping things in the garage, its about getting it on the track and flooring that fucker.

didnt you get the fax? its the Internets, it doesnt matter!

you also don’t use big words if your full of shit. easiest way to tell if someone is full of shit is to notice how many big words they use, and Lord help us all if they name their blog something ridiculously pretentious like “Contentious”, and sweetheart, ALL CAPS TITLES ARE SO 80S MIDDLE MANAGER OMG I JUST GOT TEH AOL.

my girl has no pictures, graphics or images on her blog, she has no blogroll, and she has the gall to copyright all the pearls spilling over within her site.

people who have the brass ones to throw up oldschool (c)opyrights on their blogs, unless theyre photographers, illustrators, cartoonists, or nude models almost Never have anything worth stealing. add to that over a half dozen mentions of RSS and even more regarding Podcasting, CONTENTIOUS (please tell me thats not a pun) is a steaming heap of rocky mountain oysters.

the only thing more embarrassing would be a geocities page of copywritten original poetry framed with blinking animated gifs eightbit midi tv show themes and scripts that turn your cursor into a butterfly

LOL indeed

but God Bless her because when bro emails me back to discuss my rate i will just send him her way and say you can have her for more than twice the price

or you can have mr busblog and his blithe advice whose links actually work and who isnt afraid to step up to the plate day after day after day after day and take his cuts infront of everyone

who literally wrote the book on how to blog.

got damn i love the internet.

ruminations + raymi + happy birthday, nerd + sk smith

linda was a teenage runaway.

long hair. bare feet. short nails. hot eyes. brown skin. smooth cheeks. wild mind. hard tounge. somehow bigger than life. somehow from another place entirely. somehow found the best people to migrate with. somehow made everyone better who she mixed in with. if msg had titties. nice full non allergic ones.

on a campus surrounded by beach there were hot chicks everywhere. she was the type of girl who was so sexy that she made you repeatedly reevaluate your girlfriend.

youd think things like my girlfriend doesnt climb trees. or walk around in a dayglow strapless bikini top and cut offs. my girlfriend cant roll a joint one handed while telling you about the dead show she was at last weekend. my girlfriend doesnt have lips like those or eyes like those or stories like hers or energy like her or pixie dust falling from her everythings.

and lots of the boys would say the wrong things to her and she would just exhale and run off or hop on an awaiting scooter.

magic powers of seductiveness that was equalparts innocent and guilty witchcraft and so natural.

she once made a man jump out of a two story building wearing a dress breaking both of his legs.

no one knows what she did or what she said to the young man to make him do such a thing

but theres no doubt

shes to blame.

she might even agree that shes to blame.

well somehow she ended up in the navy.

and the navy tamed her.

some folks say she was ready to be tamed and the navy was the luckier of the two because she could have sunk the whole damn fleet if she wanted, but she not only obeyed, she excelled.

one night she visited me in my san francisco bachelor pad, at the time she was stationed at treasure island, not far away.

in the middle of the night i noticed she wasnt next to me and i heard scrubbing and i went into the bathroom and she explained how she hadnt cleaned a head in over a day and it was weird for her.

so i let her clean the head.

real good.

so it wouldnt be weird for her.

and now shes a prison guard working death row in utah

where all the inmates love her.

and just last week she was on her vacation and she came through town and we ate at fred 62, the hip little coffee shop on vermont, and we drove around hollywood and beverly hills and sunset plaza drive, and everyone has a few people in their lives who will always love you and in their eyes you can do no wrong.

and thats how i feel

about linda.

craziest girlfriend i ever had.

crazy in a good way + city flirting + newyorkology + amy