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The Sex Blog Of Record
Thursday, February 28th, 2013 -- by Bacchus
I’m going to be self-indulgent today (Ha! Don’t ask about all the other days…) and post some words about the reputed death of blogging. Karl Elvis has been a friend of ErosBlog since forever, and here’s what he had to say about six weeks ago, on the occasion of his blog’s ninth anniversary:
As social media finally got a real foothold, blogging crashed and burned.
That probably makes sense. Blogging was a fad, something of an era; every fucking person on the internet seemed to have a blog for a six month period there. And then they didn’t. Abandoned blogs are the ghost town of the decade; people will tour them some day, dodging tumble weeds and spam links and stealing mementos.
Actually they won’t. Because unlike ghost towns, blogs leave nothing behind but empty hearts and minds. No blood no guts no brains at all.
There are exceptions, obviously. Great writing happened, and is still happening, in the context of blogs. No, the issue wasn’t a lack of content, it was the opposite. It was that signal-to-noise problem that chases us around the internet; when something works, really works, it has the life span of a snowflake. Perfect, brilliant, ephemeral, and then gone, lost in the waves of it’s own success. The sheer mass of irrelevancy and stupidity swamped the goodness and buried it.
But you know that. And anyway you’re not reading; who reads blogs anymore?
I wonder if Karl hasn’t accidentally put his finger on one of the reasons why I’ve recently gotten weirdly obsessive about tracking down image relationships and attributions. Some people do still read blogs, or you wouldn’t be reading this. But I never did any long-read “great writing” for writing’s sake; I was always about the “hey, look at this!” with my value added being a snarky sentence or at most a few paragraphs of commentary. On a bad day, it can look (and feel) like I’m just doing Tumblr cosplay in a costume made out of stale WordPress; what makes it a good day is the feeling of value added, of context provided. Boost signal; filter noise.
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Wednesday, October 3rd, 2012 -- by Bacchus
Erosblog’s first post went live on October 3, 2002: Is This Sex Blog Thing On? That was ten years ago, which makes us like 70 in dog years (or internet years, take your pick). Surprisingly enough, there have been 3,652 posts since then; as close to a post a day as anybody could want. Plus, 16,772 non-spam comments. Thanks to everybody for reading and participating!
I have to shout out for the three other sex bloggers who were at it before I was and who are still at it; there may be others, but these are the ones I know about and remember, who were there when I started, who I found early on, who have kept at it, and who are still here. Violet, BJ, Daze — it’s been a hell of a decade. There’ve been dozens who came later, who told us (and the world) they knew more about how to do it, who did it harder or louder, or who (maybe) did it better. But we are still here, and most of those others are not. Survival is the ultimate measure of success, no?
I also have to acknowledge Indie Nudes — an ancient and venerable “list of links” that has survived and thrived like some ancient dinosaur turtle. Lists of carefully chosen links were the way the web was organized, for a few years a long long time ago, before blogs and even before decent search engines (*cough* AltaVista *cough*). So, when Erosblog was pretty new, Indie Nudes put me on their list. They’ve kept me there ever since, and they send surprising traffic; nobody but Google sends me more. I don’t know who runs it or why they keep doing it, but thanks!
There have been lots of changes since ErosBlog was a mere puppy. The architecture has changed a bunch of times; when I started, I used a desktop blogging client for Windows called simply “BLOG”. Eventually I updated to Graymatter, but I was late to the party and its evolution was slowing down right at a time when challenges (especially in the area of comment spam) were speeding up. WordPress was the next obvious step, and by now (how many templates later?) it’s such an old friend as a content management system that I use it for everything, even things that look nothing like blogs. If all a man has is a hammer, everything looks like a nail…
Just as many changes in my life. When I started, I was single and lonely, and I had a professional job, with a tie and a (very small) office that put me one tiny step away from cubicle hell (just outside my door). I quit that job (for the second time) just days after ErosBlog went live, when the boss who was keeping the place afloat took a political appointment. I’ve been self-employed (at various things) ever since, and I couldn’t even tell you whether I still own a tie; if I do, it’s in a box in deep storage somewhere. Like most people who aren’t part of the metastasizing financial-services-and-megacorps conglomerate behemoth that’s eating the world, I’m poorer than I was ten years ago and a lot poorer than I was when I was lucky to be climbing the inflating side of the last bubble. But I’m living somewhere they can’t take away from me, I’ve got a good woman who loves me slumbering in our bed as I type this, I’ve got a big dog (who also loves me) slumbering protectively just inside my front door, and there’s pease porridge in my crockpot that’s been simmering fragrantly all night with a chopped onion and a hint of cumin. So life is excellent by any reasonable measure.
Changes in the sex blogging world? Wow. Blogging was a thing, had been for a couple-few years, when ErosBlog got going. But sex blogging as a category? I wasn’t first to do it, not by a long shot; but I think I may have been the first person to put “Sex Blogs” in my sidebar as a blogging category. Eventually it got real popular and it seemed like everybody was doing it. Even the SEO spam robots were doing it for awhile; they’d scrape actual blog posts, mash them up and change a few words out with a thesaurus program, and then bung them back up on the web somewhere as bait for GoogleBot. Now, of course, we’re on the downside of the slope; blogs are old and boring, more “stable place to put my essays” than “exciting community where I make my connections”. The web itself is changing in the era of Facebook and Twitter and the smartphone and the ecosystem of apps; people are looking at it in different ways, on smaller screens, from more places, in shorter bursts, if somebody tweets a link perhaps. Links in sidebars are as dead as webrings as a way of moving traffic around, to the point where a lot of things-that-look-like-blogs don’t link out to anybody at all and sidebars are going away as people do mobile-friendly redesigns. People still stare at screens for amusement, but almost everything about the process (when they do it, how they do it, how they decide what to stare at, how they find what to stare at) has changed.
Where in all this do sex blogs fit it, in the waning month of 2012? Well, people still like reading about sex and viewing dirty pictures, and they all have these miraculous and awesome (I think so anyway; that’s how you can tell I’m old) little always-connected internet devices in their pockets now. Even if “blogs” finish going away and “surfing the web” has become hopelessly quaint, there’s got to be some way to keep on doing what we do (find sexy stuff, pull it together, make a few wise-ass remarks about it, entertain the folk). Our challenge as sex bloggers (or whatever we become when blogging is as dead as carriage racing) is the same as it always was: to do it well enough to be valued, to earn and maintain the attention of our readers in an overstimulated world where attention is the scarcest currency.
In 2007 I asked “Will there be a Ten Candles post on October 3, 2012?” In my secret heart, I was pretty damned sure the answer was “yes”. I’m delighted to have been right. But what about the future? Will ErosBlog still be here in 2017? I’m less confident than I was in 2007; I grow older and move more slowly, while the world speeds up and accelerates into the future. But I’m persistent, and I’m stubborn. Unless I stop being entertained by porn (which seems unlikely) I can’t imagine not having bits of it that need pointed at and talked about. So, just as I did in 2007, I’ll say “I truly do hope so!”
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Sunday, November 20th, 2011 -- by Dr. Faustus
I’ll cap off this series of posts on making your own with a little practical, if perhaps boringly technical, advice about tools you can use to make your experience as creator go well.
On things everyone ought to get a little familiar with is WordPress, exceptional blogging software, some version of which powers both ErosBlog and EroticMadScience. Most hosting companies make WordPress installation available directly from your control panel, so if you set up your own domain it will be sitting there waiting for you as soon as you’re up and running. In thirty years of working with computers I’ve had few technology experiences as agreeable as being a WordPress user: it installs in seconds and if you want, you can be up and publishing to the world in minutes. You can customize it and make a really good-looking site in hours, so if you follow Bacchus’s First Rule of the Internet and start making your own on your own site, I’d say this is definitely the way to go.
An option now available in WordPress that makes it an especially good tool for creators is that not only can you use it to publish to the universe, you can also create private, password-protected multi-site blogs by using a few simple plugins. These make splendid collaboration tools: you can, if you want, create a blog that is just for you and a single artist, which might sound silly but actually allows you to see a commission develop over a series of posts from initial script and visual references through pencil sketches and other drafts (which can be accepted or critiqued in comments) to delivery of finished product: the whole thing laid out right in historical order on a page, which is both useful as a means for both you and your collaborators to learn and creates something that can be quite gratifying to look back upon as well.
For writing tools that go beyond the capabilities included in WordPress or ordinary word processors you might want to look into a product called Celtx, which I’ve been using for a few years now. Celtx is media production software which you can use to create beautifully and correctly formatted and organized screenplays, stage plays, storyboards, and comic book scripts. You can download the basic version and use it by yourself — this version is available for free. It can also be used as a collaboration tool if you subscribe to something called Celtx Studio. The studio is subscription-only, but it does allow you (and people you’re working with) to work on common projects anywhere there’s an Internet connection.
Just think what she could have accomplished if she had had Celtx!
If you want to make your own e-books, look into a tool called Calibre. This is powerful and free e-book software which not only allows you to keep track of your e-books on your own computer, but it has a conversion utility which enables you to take, say, the beautiful archive of comic books pages you’ve created and turn them into a compact file useful for other people, like a .mobi file for people to read on their Amazon Kindles (or other e-book readers — it handles many), or a single neat PDF for them to read on their desktops.
For managing images, whether re-sizing, cropping, watermarking, etc., I strongly recommend an image tool called GIMP. This usually comes pre-installed in most Linux distributions I’ve seen, and there’s also at the very least a version available for Windows as well. It is very much the publisher’s friend, and like so many good things in life, it is also available for free.
Finally, while we’re talking about free, those of you who have ever been over to EroticMadScience might have noticed that it is liberally bespangled with little icons that look like this:
These are Creative Commons Licenses. You might or might not be interested in them, but if you see your work as being a form of hedonic philanthropy especially, please consider using them. They in effect give you a way of allowing other people to share and enjoy your work, with requirements for attribution and permission for commercial use or the creation of derivative works (or not) at your option. If you want your work to spread far and wide, and want people to feel comfortable that they are in the right in doing so, the Creative Commons license gives you an excellent tool for doing that.
So now you have tools: go forth and make something!
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