I had this idea you see, that I would take the blog to the boatyard and sort it out, make it all tidy and organized, fill in the cracks, redo the varnish, stare at the many blog themes that WordPress has to offer, tweak this and that – after all I have been chucking posts on here for nearly three years now. I was going to write an Index and organize all the posts into neat little categories but…
guess what?
they don’t fit into categories
and it will take me days
and I just don’t want to do it
but people are wondering why I made the blog private, well, that was so I could mess it up in peace and quiet, because if you, dear reader, are reading it while I am trying to sort it out, it runs slow at my end
so anyway
I am just going to leave them as they are. I feel a moment of T S Eliot coming on. You know that bit about not being Prince Hamlet, but a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the sea bottom? That’s me.
My tip if you are desperate to find something on this blog, do an internet search using the blog name as a term i.e. zeb bakes plus the name of the thing you want and a search engine like Google will find it for you better than the search box on the blog does. That is what I do, yes, I use the net to search my blog.
i.e. Zeb Bakes rye bread will give you …..
Very simple and quick!
The old definition of a blog was a weblog. Like a diary, not a cook book, not a website, not a content producing factory, not a source of free images for people to stick on to their Pinboards. So that is what this is, an old-fashioned blog, where the tides of words and images rise and fall, sometimes big, sometimes small, following my rhythms and my energies. The world is full of stuff, the internet more so. I have no image to maintain, no hidden agenda from blogging, no book waiting in the wings or small business opening.
On Pinterest and similar sites
Thanks for reading. I really, truly thank all of you who read this drivel but to those of you who don’t read, who are just busily scavenging away this is addressed to you….
Please don’t pin my stuff on Pinterest ever. Please do not copy my stuff onto your sites without asking me explicitly first. I have an irrational hatred of Pinterest. It just plops me in with a host of other stuff and devalues my work. Makes me feel like I am part of some huge online shopping catalogue. No one has ever come and left a commment, saying, oh I saw your photo on Pinterest and wanted to get to know you or chat to you. It does nothing for me in the least.
Call it vanity, call it what you like. I don’t need traffic driven to this blog or whatever other justification you put on doing it. I am more than happy for you to copy stuff to use at home, you can email it to your friends, print it out for a class or whatever, just don’t copy it and plaster it all over the net with some link back and assume that I will see it and be OK with it, because I am not. As far as I am concerned it is the height of bad manners.
If you want to stare at bread photos all day, then copy someone else’s who wants to be copied, who buys into the whole Pinterest thing, there are lots of them out there who love it and welcome it. They have buttons on their sites saying ‘Pin Me, please pin me’. I don’t.
Zeb Bakes 
I’m glad it’s not just me who uses google to search for my own blogposts! I attempted to categorise my posts but let it lapse, just one more thing I felt I ought to do rather than wanted to do. It’s your blog and you’re entitled to use it as you wish, from my point of view, thank you for choosing to share your adventures in bread and life generally because I enjoy reading them. I don’t have strong views on Pinterest but if I start using it I shall be mindful of expressed desires regarding the use of photographs, wherever I find them. I hope you can enjoy your blog otherwise it becomes a drain rather than a joy. I hope you’re having a good Easter and here’s hoping for some warm weather to finally arrive!
I am not sure why I get so cross, I wish I didn’t, I wish I was calm and unruffled but that is the way I am right now. I feel often it is a generation thing, people who live in the internet, just think it is all theirs and they can do what they want with it and that everyone feels the same way as them. I guess I was just saying I don’t. I am not going to trail after people demanding they take my photos off their sites, that way madness lies, but I figured I could at least state what I feel.
Easter is what it is this year, cold and dreary. I share your wishes for milder air and a general easing into a little joy soon.
I remember reading about commonplace books and I found this definition on wikipedia –
“Commonplace books (or “commonplaces”) were a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They became significant in Early Modern Europe. “Commonplace” is a translation of the Latin term locus communis which means “a theme or argument of general application”, such as a statement of proverbial wisdom. In this original sense, commonplace books were collections of such sayings… scholars have expanded this usage to include any manuscript that collects material along a common theme by an individual.
Such books were essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces were used by readers, writers, students, and humanists as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book was unique to its creator’s particular interests.
Critically, many of these works are not seen to have literary value to modern editors. However, the value of such collections is the insights they offer into the tastes, interests, personalities and concerns of their individual compilers.
From the standpoint of the psychology of authorship, it is noteworthy that keeping notebooks is in itself a kind of tradition among litterateurs. A commonplace book of literary memoranda may serve as a symbol to the keeper, therefore, of the person’s literary identity (or something psychologically not far-removed), quite apart from its obvious value as a written record. That commonplace books (and other personal note-books) can enjoy this special status is supported by the fact that authors frequently treat their notebooks as quasi-works, giving them elaborate titles, compiling them neatly from rough notes, recompiling still neater revisions of them later, and preserving them with a special devotion and care that seems out of proportion to their apparent function as working materials.”
Blogs are a bit like that, mine especially! :)
Happy Easter!
I have heard of these but not thought of them for years, thank you Ray :) Happy Easter to you too !
I have had a commonplace book since I was 12. My first was covered in beautiful florentine paper and I bought it in St Paul’s Cathedral bookshop. Since then they have been all sorts of things. Mine mostly have quotes in them. Writing I like. It is interesting to see how my tastes have changed over the past 40 years!
Do you think your blog is like a commonplace book though?
Not for me, because my blog is specficially about my writing and my commonplace book is about anything that interests me. For some people I am sure their blog is an online version of a commonplace book.
I’ve been thinking about this a bit more and actually I’m not sure that there are many blogs that are online commonplace books. Most blogs are about the writer’s own experiences, thoughts and opinions. However, there are some photography and poetry blogs that probably do fall into the category of commonplace book; a collection of gathered information in whatever format that would be of interest
Re-read Ray’s comment, as he is the one who introduces the topic here. It wasn’t the focus or point of my original post. However, one could argue maybe that Pinterest is the modern dumbed down equivalent of a common-place book?
Sorry to hijack your post. It was just that I was thinking over your question as I lay in bed at 2.30am this morning. I think of Pinterest is more of an online scrapbook. I don’t have an account but I do have dozens visual journals where I have stuck in pictures that appeal to me, sometimes along a theme, sometimes not. I used to think I liked the cottage garden look until I realised that not a single one of the pictures I cut out was remotely cottage gardeny … very revealing :)
Hold tight. I’ve just googled pinterest and gillthepainter, and someone called Amy has pinned my blog posts.
What on earth is that all about. I’ll have to join and get her to take it off. Toot sweet.
If it publicises your art Gill, it might be of use to you?
Hi Joanna, You’ve hit the pin on the head. I agree with you on all points. I have to remind myself that my blog is my record, no matter how flattering it might appear that people have, unbeknowns to me, chosen to circulate my pictures.
Also, my classification/tags have fallen off completely.
Section 2 of their Terms and Conditions make interesting reading. Ambiguous or what :)
If WordPress loved us they would give us the software to disallow pinning, but they seem to be all in favour of it. Anyway I have said my piece now and got it out of my system.
Curating content is another wonderful euphemism that I come across recently !
Well, I did wonder why you had suddenly gone private! Now I know.
Sorry you had such a dreary Easter weatherwise in the UK – hope hot cross buns and chocolate made up for it.
I have never had anything to do with Pinterest but it doesn’t seem right that people can just put your stuff there at will.
I came back for you. We are now crossing fingers for a few degrees of warmth next week, there are rumours…
as to Pinterest I can’t change a juggernaut like that on my little ownsome and if the majority of people think it’s just great, well so it goes. Hope Spot is well, Zeb sends wagggy tails xx
I hesitate to give them publicity but here is an example of the sort of thing, apparently if I took my photos off my blog their pins would remain. My content has become their content and Pinterest asserts it has rights over it. http://pinterest.com/kimsta/bread-of-life/
Pinterest gets round the copyright issue by saying that I have to contact them with suspected copyright violations for each and every image. Who has time to do that?
Good heavens – every food blog I ever read is on there it seems. I don’t suppose the average non-blogger reader who pins something even knows what they are doing?
Spot is very well and sends tail wags back. He is sitting beside me waiting for his walk.
That is just one example Ann, I am only aware of them because they pop up in Google search. I will do a Zeb post soon. Last night he sat on the windowsill and barked for about half an hour. I recorded him doing it and attempted to make music with him, it was pitiful though :)
Just the imagery of that made me smile.
A woofin’ and whistlin’ duet :)
Pinterest for some reason doesn’t bother me. Facebook however? Drives me bonkers and hate it with a passion for all those reasons you don’t like pinterest. The fact that content can just be shared and then disappears into the ether. My pictures and words now sitting on someone else’s time line, now belonging to Facebook is infuriating.
The difference for me is that if someone shares from my timeline then it shows me who has shared it and it would have to be someone I know who is a friend as I don’t have a public timeline. I don’t use it very much. People who post to Pinterest should always check they have permission to pin other people’s stuff as I said it is bad manners not to ask. Hypothetically Would you be happy if I copied your photos and just put a link underneath back to your blog without asking you first? It would be no different to what Pinterest encourages its clients to do.
From my understanding that’s exactly what facebook can do too, having nothing to with your personal time line. Picture up, and presumably a link under it. I get traffic occasionally on my wordpress stats that has come from facebook, how, who and where though, they don’t like to share.
Coffee, cake and a good rant some time? :-)
I am with you now, was late when I looked at your reply. Slaps head. You mean as in copy from your blog not from what you post on yr timeline. Twitter, Tumblr reblogs retweets etc but I don’t mind that because it is a single event and you are not used as part of a wallpaper of images. Cake would be good xx