Resolve

Looking back on my posts from last year I see I had great plans (or, plans, at least) for a programme of increasing the pace of my study of Bengali.

But, as with the best-laid plans of mice and men, my study schedule went awry, though not entirely.

Must try harder, or my WordPress 2015 Review

I hate those blog posts that apologise for not having written more/more recently, though it was certainly something I alluded to in yesterday’s post.

Nevertheless, this blog’s sixth year of existence was hardly its greatest one, with a miserly four posts all year thanks to all sorts of valid but mundane reasons.

Naturally the plan for 2016 is to try harder, write more, learn more, do more, but then isn’t it always at this time of the year.

2013 in review for this blog

The WordPress stats helper monkeys have been busy preparing automated reports on how blogs high and low fared in 2013.

Here’s an excerpt their annual report for A Tangle Of Wires:

Now we are two

Happy birthday to me, A Tangle Of Wires is two today.

Along the way I’ve bolstered my Bengali learning and learned a whole lot more about Bollywood, which was pretty much the point of starting the blog.

What I hadn’t planned on were the high Google search rankings for Channel 4’s Bollywood films, which  probably says something about writing on a particular niche.

Here’s to the next two years.

Life, but with fuzzy edges

At break-neck slow-motion speed a week has passed since my new son arrived. This has put all non-essential work to one side as I take charge of cooking, cleaning, childcare and my wife recovers.

In the pipeline is a post on Bengali words around a baby theme; updating the older posts I transfered from Blogger to WordPress; and building up the Learning Bengali pages (any suggestions for what this should include would be gratefully received).

First, perhaps will be the baby words. In fact I persuaded my elder son to make suggestions for this today, so it’s creeping along. I didn’t fancy preparing this in advance, just in case it would tempt any kind of fate, so now it’s somewhere on the to-do list, behind sleep.

Transferring back from Blogger

Move along please. Nothing to see here. Transferring back from Blogger, need to check twitterfeed and Google docs behave themselves.

WordPress no longer ignores me

WordPress is no longer ignoring me – so perhaps I just have the world’s smallest supply of patience. Whatever the reason for last week’s problems, I’ll stick with Blogger for the time being and see how we get on.

Moved to blogger for now

I have no patience and ended up on blogger after I thought WordPress was not going to work for me. Now it does but it’s too late for the time being. So the blog is (for now) here.

Twitter raises the usability bar

I’m new to blogging, but a long time reader of (mainly music) blogs. I recently started out on micro-blogging platform Twitter, you know, the one everybody’s talking about. It took a while to get my head around the idea of making everything public for anyone to see, which I know is hardly a new concept when it comes the Internet but one that took a bit of adjustment for me.

What was particularly impressive about it was how easy it is to use. Signing up, getting started, customising my page – there were no real issues there. The comparison with the headaches I had earlier this week with WordPress could not have been clearer. Those headaches may well have be a combination of Internet service, browser, operating system and of course my own lack of technical skills, but they showed how high Twitter and Google’s various tentacles have raised my expectations.

Now I just expect web applications to work, moreover I expect them to be free too and quickly move on if these criteria are not met. I can see this makes me a picky customer, but I doubt I’m unusual there.

Blog practice

Still testing out blogspot and blogging ideas. Expect I’ll stick with blogspot – or is it blogger? – given the headaches with trying to set up WordPress (.com version).

Also looking forward to writing non-‘I’m setting up a blog’ posts on proper subjects. You know, like music, films, books, creative writing, art and learning Bengali.