{"id":2995,"date":"2010-06-01T10:51:54","date_gmt":"2010-06-01T15:51:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/?p=2995"},"modified":"2010-06-01T10:51:54","modified_gmt":"2010-06-01T15:51:54","slug":"how-i-blog-an-explanation-for-the-missing-book-reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/2010\/20100601-2995.htm","title":{"rendered":"How I blog (An explanation for the missing book reviews)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.readingtoknow.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Carrie<\/a> read <a href=\"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/books\/watters_c-getmarried.htm\">one<\/a> of the book reviews I&#8217;d linked up to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.5minutesforbooks.com\/5915\/i-read-it-june\/\" target=\"_blank\">5 Minutes 4 Books&#8217; &#8220;I read it&#8221; carnival<\/a> and commented thus:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;So &#8211; do you have two blogs and am I horribly confused? I&#8217;m subscribed in Google Reader but I never see these book reviews pop up! What&#8217;s with that? Am I blind or something? I&#8217;m always surprised when you link up and then I scramble back through and catch up. Is it me?&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>No, Carrie, it isn&#8217;t you.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a rather nefarious plot of mine to completely befuddle my readers.<\/p>\n<p>Okay.  It&#8217;s not really that either.<\/p>\n<p><em>[What follows is the long story&#8211;and the short.  Feel free to skip ahead to the &#8220;short&#8221; if you&#8217;d rather not read my whole blogging history.]<\/em><\/p>\n<p><b>Long Story<\/b><\/p>\n<p>You see, before I switched to using the WordPress blogging platform almost a year ago, I did my entire website by hand.  I started with a blank text document in Microsoft&#8217;s notepad and ended with a web page, coding the html, css, php, and whatever else I needed as I went.  <\/p>\n<p>This was fantastic for building and maintaining my web-authoring skill set, but not so nice for getting daily posts done in a timely manner.  So after a year of regular blogging (I&#8217;ve had a website since 2001 but have only consistently blogged since April or May 2008), I decided to switch to using WordPress.<\/p>\n<p>I didn&#8217;t want to let my skill set decline, though, so I continued building my &#8220;static pages&#8221; from scratch.  I use the &#8220;old-fashioned&#8221; text-file edited html to create my Bible study, book review, and recipe pages (and use a completely different program to create my photo albums).  <\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, these pages aren&#8217;t connected to WordPress&#8217;s auto-feeds.  I realized this from the outset and tried to solve the problem by continuing my hand-coded RSS feed.  The problem with that was that some people were only subscribed to my hand-coded feed&#8211;and therefore missed my regular blog posts.  It was quite a conundrum.  I deleted the hand-coded feed and directed those subscribers over to the blog feed.  <\/p>\n<p>But that left me without any way to let my readers know when I posted a new book review, recipe, Bible study, photo album, etc.<\/p>\n<p><b>Short<\/b><\/p>\n<p>In short, because I hand-code my book reviews, they don&#8217;t show up on my RSS feed.  This is tragic for my readers (and potentially for my blog statistics), but I really want to maintain my html skills.<\/p>\n<p>In order to help readers find the static content I&#8217;ve recently added to bekahcubed, I&#8217;ve started to post a weekly <a href=\"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/category\/recap\">&#8220;Recap&#8221;<\/a>.  Recap posts follow a predetermined format, first showcasing any new pages that I&#8217;ve added to bekahcubed over the course of the week and then sharing any interesting links I&#8217;ve discovered on the web over the same week.  <\/p>\n<p>So if you&#8217;re looking for new book reviews or recipes (or if you want to see the photographical evidence that I really am real), take a quick scan of the &#8220;Recaps&#8221; that are posted every Saturday night at 11:59 pm Central time&#8211;and click the links to anything that looks interesting.<br \/>\n<strong><br \/>\n<i>And there you have it: my nefarious plot to befuddle my readers (and my attempt at a workaround to still engage the most persistent of them all.)<\/i><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today, Carrie read one of the book reviews I&#8217;d linked up to 5 Minutes 4 Books&#8217; &#8220;I read it&#8221; carnival and commented thus: &#8220;So &#8211; do you have two blogs and am I horribly confused? I&#8217;m subscribed in Google Reader but I never see these book reviews pop up! What&#8217;s with that? Am I blind &#8230; <a title=\"How I blog (An explanation for the missing book reviews)\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/2010\/20100601-2995.htm\">Read more <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">How I blog (An explanation for the missing book reviews)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2995"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2995"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2995\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}