just blogging things (about MEDIA!)

Happy Friday the 13th, everyone! It's no secret that blogging is extremely near and dear to my heart. I love reading your blogs. And I follow like... wow, so many. I also love writing here too and find the whole thing oddly fulfilling.

After publishing more than 1,000 posts, I've learned a few tips and tricks about the mechanics of creating blog posts. So I thought I'd share!

Spoiler alert, tho: This isn't about SEO or driving traffic or quitting your day job bc you're about to earn so much bank from equestrian blogging sponsorships. Someone else may have those answers but... Yea, it ain't me.

I'm also not going to tell you how to develop your content or target audiences. As far as I can tell, the most compelling blogs to me, personally, are those with a truly authentic voice. In other words, you do you. Write about the stuff you care about. That's really the biggie, imo.

HOWEVER. I *do* have a couple thoughts about making the process of blogging a little more streamlined. Whether for you as author and creator, or for you as reader.

this post is also serving as a vehicle to share some of the last photos Austen got from loch moy. my blog, my rules!

1. Scheduling posts can be a lifesaver. Have you ever accidentally hit "Publish" too soon? Like maybe you meant to preview the post, but clicked the wrong button and then - oops! - your unfinished draft post went live!

That's happened to me more than once, and it's annoying. Like, obviously it's nbd to revert a post back to draft form and republish it later. But feed readers like Feedly and Bloglovin capture that post content the moment it goes live, and then won't reflect any changes or edits made to it (even if you delete your post, it's still on Feedly!).

In fact, unless you restart with a fresh post entirely (and thus a new url, I guess), the feed reader won't capture any changes. And readers who get your blog updates through those sites will be notified of the new post too soon, and will reach an error page when they click through. So sad :(

I avoid this by scheduling my posts in the future. That's the first thing I do when starting a new post. Typically I like to publish posts early in the morning (4am Eastern time) for all the folks (myself included) who enjoy reading blogs as part of the morning routine of coffee and breakfast etc. Kinda like a digital age newspaper haha.

Tho I get that not everybody writes posts in advance. And there's something to be said for sitting down, hammering out a post, and hitting "Publish." Sometimes tho, it's nice to have that extra fail-safe to make sure you don't accidentally hit "Publish" too soon. Even just scheduling the post for an hour later can provide that buffer zone.

sometimes candid photos are my favorite

2. Tracking your favorite blogs with a feed reader. On the subject of feed readers, I use Feedly, personally. I have a section devoted entirely to equestrian blogs and add or remove content as I see fit.

The nice thing about a feed reader is that it captures every new post from the blogs you follow, and can organize them by "read" vs "unread," and "latest" vs "oldest." However you like. That way you never have to miss a post if you don't want to.

Tho let's say you went on vacation and return to dozens (or, uh, hundreds) of unread posts... you can just "mark as read" as you see fit. Similarly, if there's a post you really liked and want to save it for later, there's a function for that too.

Basically, feed readers are one-stop-shops for managing all your favorite online content, and it makes following my favorite blogs much easier! Ooh and the mobile app is really great too.

3. Managing your Media. As a self described media junkie, I often err on the side of way too many goddamn pictures. What can I say, but that I use this space as a digital photo album?

Simultaneously tho, I've often had slow internet. Both as an author and a reader. Nothing frustrates me more than images taking forever to load. So I've learned a couple things over the years about optimizing load times.

this is .... not the first time i've tried to share my beer with a pony haha
also, see below for more detail, but if there's a portrait oriented picture i really want to use, i'll combine two to get an overall image that's landscape orientation. ie, wider than it is tall

3a. Organizing videos and photos on your computer. I transfer all my media from my iphone to my PC before uploading to the blog. I just plug the phone into my PC's USB port, and a file explorer window will automatically open, allowing me to browse all photos and videos.

This is the precursor of the following points, plus helps declutter the phone to free up space.

3b. Optimizing formats for faster load times. Once I've got all my chosen media moved to computer, I reformat pictures to reduce file size - thus improving load times.

For instance, screen shots from video are a super great way to capture all your favorite action shots, right? (esp bc by my estimates, fewer than 1 in 6 blog readers will actually press "play" on videos, so if there's something you really want readers to see, better to have it in picture or gif form in addition to video!).

However, most screen shots (at least on the iphone) are formatted automatically as .PNG files, compared to the standard camera photo that's a .jpg. On my phone, the typical screen cap .PNG file is about 1334x750 pixels and 2.30 MB. Compared to a normal camera .jpg photo that's about 4032x3024 pixels and 2.38 MB.

just this one step makes a world of difference in load times, trust me!

In other words, that camera shot has way more pixels for being about the same "weight" file. PNG files are "heavier" per pixel than a .jpg. These exact numbers may vary by cell phone and camera, but probably not by much.

Meanwhile, if you take that same exact .PNG file with the dimensions listed above, and save it as a .jpg (by opening it with MS Paint or similar, then going to "save as" and changing the file type) it drops to somewhere around 400-500 KB. A much lighter file size-wise. This file will upload faster as you write your blog post, and it will load faster for readers visiting your page. Win win.

Long story short, even if you make no other edits to your images, you can improve your post's load performance by reformatting screenshots into .jpg files.

3c. Creating a visually appealing reading experience / Cropping for effect. In a similar vein, here are more ideas for editing your pictures. This isn't for everyone. I get that. Not everyone cares to spend a lot of time (or, uh, any time) editing pictures. Possibly even reformatting from .PNG to .jpg is too much haha. Which, ya know. Fair. It's your blog, you do you!

Also. Fair warning: What I'm about to say may be blasphemy to photographers and media consumers who value high resolution and crisp focus above all else. Again.... I love a nice HQ photo.... but I love fast load times more haha. So I will sacrifice resolution in a picture for smaller file size any day of the week. Sorry not sorry.

(also, if readers view these images from tiny phone screens, does it even matter anyway??)

original screen shot vs cropped image. both images are the same width, but one is way more visually interesting

Personally, I like all my pictures to be about identical in width to my blog's reading pane. For the format I use, this equates to 575 pixels in image width. I also prefer landscape orientation. It just seems to create an overall nicer, cleaner aesthetic for scrolling down the page.

To accomplish this, I open all images in MS Paint (any similar software will work), crop the image to improve focus on the central subject and remove excess "background", then resize the whole thing to 575 pixels. Bonus is that these reduced-size images are all right around ~100 KB in size. They load super fast!

Then, when I upload the image to blogger, I adjust how blogger sizes the image so that instead of the automatic "Medium" size it wants to present everything as, I tell it to use the "original size."

aaaaaand back to awkward charlie face. bc his goofy expressions never get old, do they haha

4. Getting the most out of videos. As I wrote above, by my estimates fewer than 1 in 6 readers will actually watch a video. That ratio drops significantly if you have multiple videos in a post.

Now again, depending on your purposes you might not care. Maybe you want separate videos for your own records and reference. Or like, maybe you have footage from different classes at a horse show and it makes sense to keep them as separate videos. Totally cool.

Personally, I find that where possible (especially for footage from schooling rides and lessons, for instance), it's easiest for everyone if I combine multiple clips into a single video.

I'm pretty sure Youtube has this functionality, but I use Microsoft Movie Maker, a free software on my PC. It's easy to use (for instance, this is how I add captions to dressage tests) esp bc I already move all media from my phone to my computer.

Plus, this software gives you the option to save the file in different formats. Again, in the interest of optimizing upload time (in this case, uploading a video to Youtube on my slow ass internet) I save my videos as 720p. This still technically qualifies as "high quality" (thus not degrading the viewer's experience) but is also wayyyy faster to upload than the default 1080p.

Plus, let's say you've got a video that you think is super awesome, but there's one particular moment in it that you really want to force your readers to see immortalize on your blog. Perfect fodder for a gif, right? Especially if it's about 7 seconds or less. If you create this clip in Movie Maker and save it as that 720p format, it'll upload to your gif-maker of choice wayyy faster.

don't say i never gave you anything! lolol....

On that note, I have been using Giphy lately as my go-to. I prefer to download the finished gif from the website, then upload it to my blog. Tho they also offer an embed function too, but I find the reliability of that embedded gif declines over time. Meaning, a couple months down the road that gif might not work any more.

Whereas if you upload it to your blog it'll stay in your photo archives for whenever you feel like you just reeeeeally need that gif of Emma getting bucked off of a pony named Krimpet. Ahem.


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So. For all you media junkies out there who are trying to get all the pictures without all the slow loading, hopefully some of this has been useful.

Or maybe you have other ideas or tips or tricks (or pet peeves?) that I left off the list? Are there other apps or software that you use? Have you discovered anything that made blogging way easier?

Or maybe you don't really get into all these details and prefer to just bang out the quick and dirty post? Or maybe you're appalled by some of the primitive ways (hellloooo MS Paint!) I go about editing media??