Social Media Malaise, or I Miss Blogging

Last night I was staring blankly at my various Twitter streams on Hootsuite, wondering where to get a conversation started and feeling guilty that I wasn't following up on all of the fabulous, pertinent, relevant, useful bits of information and cool websites that Über Teachers were spitting out.

I flipped over to Facebook, liked a few remarks so I liked them, but wasn't really sure what to do there.

The social media evening had started out with grand expectations; I had been planning on "settling into some quality online time." You can even see the proof of that intention here.

But I quickly became listless and hopelessly unproductive. Let's face it: I'm suddenly feeling tired of hanging out with the same old social networks. You can even see proof of that sentiment here.

So I decided to take a trip back in time to the blogosphere of my past. Google Reader had been a scary place for me for the past few months, a guilt-inducing reminder of all the blogs I'm not reading and, especially, that I'm not writing.

But my visit there wasn't so daunting. I noticed that a lot of my best blogging buddies were slowing down their blogging pace too. They may have even been staring blankly at Hootsuite as I stared blankly at Google Reader.

I didn't stare blankly for very long. I left some comments, even though I almost felt like an intruder doing so. I signed up for comment subscriptions, something I had previously written off as a waste of time.

The hour got late, but by the end of the evening I felt like I had actually "engaged" again in a way I don't do on Facebook or Twitter.

I miss blogging, and I think I will have to do something about that.

NaBloPoMo: An inglorious conclusion

(Click on image to feel the pain of my abysmal evening, and no, this is not OUR declaration.)

My husband and I fill out our French taxes online and, normalement, we had until June the 10th to do so.

Then suddenly this afternoon, for a reason too confusing/personal/mundane/inane/all of the above, it became necessary for us to file online today -- as in this evening when I got home from work at nearly 7pm.

Consequently, I almost forgot to do this last NaBloPoMo post.

I will wax eloquently about my month of daily blogging at a later date...maybe June the 10th?

Of NaBloPoMo and feed readers

Only three days to go.

This is my third NaBloPoMo, and although I haven't necessarily engendered a lot of comments, I have enjoyed the theme: "Looking Up." It led me on a treasure hunt through my photos, and I found quite a few where I had pointed my camera lens upwards.

Another advantage of participating, for me, is that it does get me back in touch with my blog and the blogosphere. During the month, I installed a new feed reader: Feed Demon. It's a desktop application and gets a little buggy if you don't use it regularly, but I find it more intuitive than Google Reader.

Then, through @chrisrat, I got onto something really fun: Feedly. This little toy swallows up your RSS feeds and spits them out into something that looks more like an online magazine than a bunch of files.

So, to sum up this rather rambling post, NaBloPoMo always brings me some new discoveries, and this time around has been no exception.

Halfway Lost in Google Image Search Land

The relevance, or irrelevance, of this photo to today's post will be explained below.

Maybe it's the fun NaBloPoMo theme of "looking up" that has buoyed my efforts, but so far daily blogging hasn't been a chore at all.

Today I wanted to do a simple post of about four words, such as "Halfway through NaBloPoMo." Okay, that's three words, but who's counting besides myself?

But I decided to look for a photo because, well, I've almost always posted with photos. Such was the error of my ways (she writes an hour later.) Go find a good photo to illustrate the notion of "halfway."

Yep, I liked that one, but it was copyrighted and I generally live by those rules.

Then I got lost in Google Image Search Land.

"Halfway house." I hadn't thought about the notion for awhile. It conjured up some vague image of my parents telling me about some child of friends' of theirs who had gotten "mixed up with drugs."

Halfway is the name of a bike model, or a style of bike, or some such. Not that I really care, but there were sure a lot of photos of it messing up the efficiency of my Google Image Search.

Halfway, Oregon. Yes, fellow Pacific Northwesterners, there is a Halfway, Oregon. Did you know that? I didn't. Apparently it got darn cold there in 1948-1949. I would have liked to use a photo of this town for my post, but the one I found was copyrighted too.

An old menu from a restaurant called The Halfway House. Cool! The restaurant was in Seattle. Even cooler! There's a post about it on a way cool site called VintageSeattle.org. I just had to take a break to bookmark it so I can never look at it again.

A Ramones album called Halfway to Sanity. I could surely use this photo, and did:

But it didn't really illustrate anything I wished to convey in this post, and the word "halfway" didn't come out very well visually.

So, I went with the Wikipedia Media Commons photo of "Snowdon Mountain Railway No.2 climbing towards Halfway Station..." because I'm halfway through NaBloPoMo, and still chugging along.

Looking up 1: taken on the day I met a blogging friend who became a real friend

A quick warning to anyone planning on following my NaBloPoMo foray this month: it's going to be all about photos.

The theme is "looking up." I realize that since I started blogging in December 2005 and, at the same time, taking a number of digital photos, I have become much more aware of things above me, and have taken many photos of them that have never worked their way into this blog. This is my chance to use them.

For some posts, such as today's, I'm going to try to entice you with a little clue that will make you wonder where, when and with whom...or else I will tell the story behind the photo.

It's going to be fun.

The tug of blogging

I wonder if my blogging future is going to look like this: general sloth and non-involvement, with an occasional burst of activity thanks to NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month.)

I believe NaBloPoMo was originally November, but now this Ning group proposes a monthly theme for anyone who wants to latch on and try to post every day for a month.

I had no intention of getting into this for May, but this morning an email arrived announcing that the theme would be "look up." I signed up.

If anything, it will be a good chance to post some of the many photos I have accumulated of rooves, windows, shutters and the like!

See you for the next 31 days...

WE did it!

As I mentioned several times over the last month, I don't know what possessed me to do NaBloPoMo this January. There was a theme -- "best" -- which I thought might be fun to write about, but I don't think I ever even used the word.

But I did carry on. My conclusions are:

1.) It is probably good for anyone who wants to keep blogging to do NaBloPoMo once a year. It does get a certain momentum going, even if post quality can suffer.

2.) I don't think I would ever want to make La France Profonde a daily blog, but after a 31-day string of posts, getting back to posting twice a week seems feasible, if not straight out easy.

3. NaBloPoMo is best done with a few others. Of course one can find myriad "others" by going to the official site, but I was lucky enough to have two contacts just fall into place: longtime blogging (and now Facebook) buddy tut-tut from Inside the Shell, and Claudine from Good Things, whom I had run into in comments columns. Both of these ladies commented on every single post of mine, no matter how lame, and I did the same...not that THEY wrote any lame posts, of course!

The "best" thing about NaBloPoMo in my book is finishing it! Cheers!

To A Taste of Garlic -- merci beaucoup!

The screenshot for the review of my blog on "A Taste of Garlic"

This morning, I was thrilled to discover through a Google alert that Keith Eckstein had published a review of La France Profonde.

I'd recently become aware of a his most delightful blog where he reviews other blogs related to France: A Taste of Garlic. I think I first got onto his blogging concept when I learned that he had reviewed Living the Life in Saint Aignan, written by my longtime blogging buddy Ken Broadhurst.

If you're looking for France-related blogs, A Taste of Garlic is a gold mine. But read the review of La France Profonde first...

Merci Keith!

What was I thinking?

Six days into NaBloPoMo, and I almost forgot to post this evening.

What was I thinking when I signed up?

Being in the dead of winter, with my energy level at a corresponding low, this was no time to undertake unreasonably ambitious projects.

But I will hang in there, if only for her...and her...my partners in NaBloPoMo crime.

Sidebar statement

You know you're doing NaBloPoMo when you're reduced to writing a post about your blog sidebar. But I do have a few things to say on the matter, and that is what's going to get said this evening.

As part of whipping this blog back into shape, I have undertaken a major sidebar clean-up. Every blog that lay to the right of my posts got checked out, was deleted or kept, and sometimes recategorized. My main reason for deleting blogs was that they appeared to be inactive or, of course, shut down entirely. Some blogs fell into this category, but not as many as I thought.

Now I plan to start transferring links from my two defunct blogs, And So Forth and Cuisine Quotidienne. That may take some time, and in fact may well wait until February, when the NaBloPoMo marathon ends.

Oh yes, and the point of all this? It's that I'm never going back here again.

Four Years of La France Profonde

With all of the activity of Christmas and our trip to Amsterdam squeezed in between Christmas and New Year's, I didn't even think of taking the time to recognize a milestone: the 4th anniversary of the creation of La France Profonde.

Those were heady times. Sure, some of the contacts I made in that first year had already been blogging for a while. I remember being so impressed that SHE had been showering the blogosphere with her genius since 2004 (!) But many of you, I think, had started around the same time or were to start during 2006.

My initial objective for this blog was simply to write about Aveyron. I imagined a near-journalistic, factual approach to the subject, and at one time even started doing some historical research about the area. I saw blogging as a ""publish and be read" activity, and didn't even know that comments would be left, contacts would be made, and friendships would be built as a result of this space.

Along the line, I created two other blogs, Cuisine Quotidienne and And So Forth. The former enjoyed mild success, but I have lost my cooking drive for the moment, and think if I do get it back, I will post about cooking here.

If truth be told, time for my two other blogs likely got funneled into Facebook and Twitter, which have been rich additions to my online life.

Over the past few months, I have lacked inspiration for keeping up even this blog, but have decided it is an important part of my life -- thus the injection of some NaBloPoMo mojo for January 2010!

And yes, expect a few ramblings about blogging and the future direction of La France Profonde during my marathon of 31 posts...any suggestions are welcome!

The traditional Happy New Year post

First, let me wish you (any readers I have left) a grand 2010, full of good things in whatever size packages they come in!

Second, without making any huge proclamations about blogging New Year's Resolutions, I have taken the plunge of participating, for the second time, in NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month.) Traditionally, NaBloPoMo is in November, but it is possible to sign up for any month.

What does one sign up for exactly? The commitment to posting once a day for the entire month.

Perhaps it was in the stars, but one of my best blogging buddies, who has also been a bit lacking in the blogging inspiration department, has signed up too.

Wish us luck!

A Missed Opportunity

This salmon being smoked at the Hanover Christmas market reminded me of my Pacific Northwest Heritage -- and she felt the same way.

Christina, of Mausi, and I have a lot in common. We're both from the PNW, she from Vancouver, B.C. and me from Olympia, WA. We've both lived in Europe, married to Europeans, since 1990. And we're both involved in ESL teaching.

I've followed her blog off and on, and she mine. But when I went to Hanover in early December for a conference followed by a weekend "just for me," I neglected to write anything about it on this blog. And after a very short post about the Hanover trip, I got this comment from Christina:

As in Hanover, Germany?? Dang, we could have had coffee!

And the worst thing is, we really could have, because I had all Saturday to myself!

Regrets, regrets...but maybe a message to myself to get back into the blogosphere somehow.

In the meantime, I'll refer you to this wonderful post by Christina about the Hanover Christmas market, or Weihnachtsmarkt, and the general festive atmosphere in Germany at this time of year...because who knows if I'll have time to do a big post about my trip!

I am, however, going to make an effort to get back to blogging on FP. I miss it and I miss you all.

La France Profonde: Three years and three hundred posts!

A few of the guests at La France Profonde's third anniversary party

Today I am celebrating La France Profonde's third anniversary -- and my 300th France Profonde post.

I'm a few days late, as I actually started this blog on December 23, 2008. But I thought it would be nice to coincide with the 300th post. Plus, after three years, what's a day or two?

For this significant event, I took a look back over some old posts as well as my comment history.

First, what has been the most commented-on post on La France Profonde? I thought it would be this one, but actually it was:

Is life really a bitch without big chocolate chips?

So I guess among my readers, food wins out over politics any time.

I also made a list of a few of my favorites posts, in no particular order:

Traces of cafés past

Good-bye little bird -- and don't forget to fly home

An Odd Couple

La Gare de Rodez at Dawn

Old reflects against new

The latter post also contains what may be my favorite photo -- at least among those that I've taken:


After that, I also took a rather quick look at my early comments. I had been writing this blog for over a month before I got a comment that just "came in" from somebody I didn't know: on February 4, 2006, on a post about the local Bosch factory, I received a comment from Stéphan R., who kept up the Toulouse, One Day, One Photo blog very nicely for almost two years before disappearing from the blogosphere in May 2007.

I often wonder what happened to Stéphan, and I suspect if I went back carefully over my comments, I would find plenty of bloggers that I was in touch with for months before either their blog or our communication dwindled down to nothing.

But for now, I'm here, and La France Profonde is going into its fourth year with no plans to change much of anything.

Un grand merci to all of my readers for your comments and support!