Poor Richard’s Almanac

Photos? What photos? November 7, 2010

Posted by ourfriendben in Uncategorized, wit and wisdom.
Tags: blogging, FoodPress, Freshly Pressed, Luddites, our friend Ben, Poor Richard's Almanac, WordPress
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It’s me, Richard Saunders of Poor Richard’s Almanac fame, here today to talk about a query that’s been cropping up a lot on our blog lately and causing some confusion to your humble bloggers, yours truly, Silence Dogood, and our friend Ben. Our blog host is WordPress, which we love, and it has a great spam filter, Akismet. Akismet has been auto-dumping all these queries into our spam folder. Why?

The general query seems both harmless and relevant. In its many incarnations, it’s basically “Why don’t you ever change the design of your blog, and why don’t you have any photos?” We think these are perfectly legitimate questions that deserve honest answers. What confuses us is why we’re being swamped with bazillion versions of this query now, and why they’re all going straight to spam. We’ll answer the questions anyway.

We don’t change our blog’s design because we’re Poor Richard’s Almanac and we think the design looks, well, appropriately almanac-ish. We also think the typeface and clean presentation make our posts easy to read, and since our blog is all about reading and writing, that’s very important to us.

So much for the easy question. Why we don’t have photos is also easy to answer, but more complex in its implications. Basically, we don’t have photos because, as our friend Ben says upfront in the blog’s subhead, we’re Luddites. All three of us are so technologically inept that replacing a lightbulb constitutes a major technological achievement. Or try this recent technological breakthrough, as reported to me by Silence:

OFB: Silence, there’s something wrong with the coffee machine! I can’t get it to turn on!

Silence: Mmmmpfff. [Rolls over, pulls up blanket, ignores OFB.]

OFB: Please, Silence! I can’t figure out the problem. Please get up and see what’s wrong with it!

Silence: [Suppresses comments, staggers into kitchen, stares at coffeemaker.] Ben, I unplugged it last night to make popcorn and forgot to plug it back in. See? It’s unplugged. Now watch this! [Plugs in cord, turns on coffee machine.] Isn’t it amazing?!

OFB: It’s still not coming on.

[Silence and OFB stare at machine in horror. Silence turns on countertop oven and stove. Nothing. She presses the "test" and "reset" buttons on a light switch/outlet at the end of the counter. Nothing. After about five tries, she goes to the circuit-breaker box in the mudroom and begins flipping switches. Nothing. Depsondent, she returns to the kitchen.]

Silence: Ben, nothing’s working. I guess we’ll have to call the handyman and hope he can get down here today. We have to have a working stove!

OFB: Er. Remember when this happened before? I would swear you were able to get everything working again by pushing those buttons on the outlet.

Silence: But I did push the buttons, over and over, and nothing’s happened.

OFB: Maybe you should try again.

Silence: [Glares at OFB, furiously pushes buttons on outlet, finally sees that one says "test" and one says "reset" and pushes the test button first, then the reset, then stops pushing.] Try it now, Ben.

OFB: Hey, the light came on!

[curtain] 

I’m no better. If I weren’t a teacher, I probably wouldn’t know anything about technology at all. So as you can imagine, our collective photographic skills are pretty much nil. I can at least manage to get the entire subject in the photo, unlike OFB, who always manages to cut off the top of someone’s head or the tips of his dog’s ears, or poor Silence, whose shots tend to be obliterated by her thumb inevitably placed over part of the lens. As for digital photography, splurging on a digital camera, downloading photos, manipulation of digital images, and the like: forget that.

It’s not that we don’t enjoy photos on other people’s blogs; of course we do. But we’re writers, and we use our blog as a showcase for our writing, whether we’re trying to be helpful (like Silence), informative (like me), or just ranting (as in the typical OFB post). We all believe that strong writing conveys images along with sounds, scents, and every other sensation. So the challenge for us is to make sure our writing is good enough. And we leave it to our readers to be the judges of that. So far, according to WordPress’s counter, we’ve had over 223,000 visits from people seeking information or entertainment, so somebody’s reading us, even without photos. 

But even our beloved WordPress exacts a price for our photo-free posts. WordPress now has two features that showcase blogs it deems worthy of attention. One, called Freshly Pressed, prominently features its picked posts every time you go on the WordPress site to log on. The other, FoodPress, highlights posts about food and cooking. (I’ll bet you guessed that.) In both cases, showcased blogs have the opportunity to attract millions of new viewers. WordPress should be commended for helping its bloggers reach a wider audience.

For us, there’s just one little problem: To be featured, your blog must have photos. We find this a bit ironic for a blog host called WORDPress, but there it is. As a teacher by vocation and a historian, coin collector, backyard birdwatcher, and hot-pepper enthusiast by avocation, this doesn’t bother me; my topics are probably too obscure to rate showcasing even if they did have photos. But I know it kills our friend Ben, since a showcased post might finally attract the attention of a MacArthur award nominator, and distresses Silence, who is quite passionate about her cooking posts. (“Imagine if Julia Child or MFK Fisher or, say, Escoffier had been forced to include photos with their writing!” Silence sniffs. And the FoodPress guidelines were especially merciless, saying in effect “Nobody wants to read your stupid recipe if it doesn’t show photos of the food!!!”)

Well, we beg to differ. Silence rightly points out that food photography is the hardest of all. I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of unappetizing photos of food that make you wish you’d never eaten before in your life; we certainly have. Better to have no photos than to show bad photos, and that applies to every post, whatever its topic, but especially to something that’s supposed to be enticing. Kudos to those bloggers—and we know several—who are both good writers and good photographers!

Of course, we’re aware that you don’t have to be a good photographer to add visual interest to your posts. One of our blogging friends is a genius at finding photos and illustrations that provide an ironic visual commentary on his posts. What we can’t figure out is where he finds them, how long it takes him to find them, and how it could possibly be legal to simply put them up on one’s own blog without even crediting their originators, much less paying them.

The three of us here at Poor Richard’s Almanac aren’t in agreement about all things, to say the least. But we are in agreement about this: Tempus fugit. Time is fleeting. There’s only so much sand in the hourglass, and we have plenty to do in our real lives to use it up. We blog for pleasure, not profit or celebrity. We love thinking, writing, kicking it up in our posts and having fun doing it. As Sherlock Holmes famously noted, there’s only so much room in the brain-attic, so you’d better focus on storing the things that matter to you and clean out the rest. Please don’t ask us to waste time becoming competent photographers; the blogosphere is flooded with them. Let us put our focus on something else: On becoming such good thinkers and writers that you want to read our posts, even if there’s nary a photo to be seen. We may have a way to go, but trust us, we’re working on it.

                    Your friend,

                                   Richard Saunders