Visit the neighbors

Blogging University: Day 3

It’s only Day 3 and I’m struggling. Day 3 is a particular burden because its task is to meet the “neighbors”. That’s not in my repertoire of “behavior”.

The task is made doubly difficult because my neighbours are so hard to find. Maybe if I was able to spend less time studying the convolutions of the Learn more in the tools and tips for this assignment section I might find something I’d like to read. As it is, this instruction could easily take up a week of my life before I’ve even scratched the surface of the WordPress.com Reader.

But I will persevere trying to find like-minded souls on whom I can lavish my praise for their prose. It really can’t be that hard.

Two other irritants have set me against meeting my misspelled “neighbors”. Too many of them are lazy arseholes who mistake WordPress tags for social-media tags (the difference is clearly explained), so finding worthy stuff is a major piece of detective work. And there’s no master list of WordPress.com tags. I’m sure someone out there has written an excellent introduction to practical insect taxidermy, but finding it would amount to the equivalent of doing it.

Still, by using a list of “popular WordPress.com tags” I found on the web, I have, as requested, managed to locate and follow a few blogs. I even commented on one of them in the Blogging Community.

Irritant 2 is the gap between the WordPress.com web application and the mobile app. All the linked guides seem to be illustrated for web use, whereas I’m a mobile app user. Constantly switching between the two is to journey down the road to Hell.

So Day 3 has been a tick-box exercise. I sniffed around the Reader and started following. I’d much rather WordPress found suitable things for me to read, in much the same way that Amazon finds stuff for me to buy that I’d never believe I wanted.

Any meaningful connection with my “neighbors” will have to wait until I’m better acquainted with the Reader. Whether it will be the start of a beautiful friendship is hard to say. Ho hum.

Read all about Day 2 at Blogging University.