Friday 20 September 2024: Still doing date work

I was late again publishing the day’s blog post, as I’d left it dangling the night before. I finalised that and got it posted, then started on today’s straight away.

The Diane’s Gig List post was up, so I shared that. Then I did a double tech declutter on Twitter/X, removing some followers, unfollowing them, and getting rid of yet more old posts and replies. I’m now not even getting anything in my feed, despite still following some, so I think the X bots may have sussed what I’m gradually doing.

Then it was back to the date work. I was halfway through the On This Day for the month of March and wanted to finish that. There seems to have been a lot going on in March 2020 (pandemic year) and  1945 (Second World War ending) and it was taking longer than usual to plough through it all. 

So I took regular breaks throughout the day, doing something different to break the monotony of doing the same thing for hours and hours and hours and hours…

I decided to upload the story I submitted to Medium on Wednesday to Vocal a week earlier than planned. Medium were taking too long to respond, whereas Vocal is instant. 

Vocal looks like it’s changed a lot since I was last on there, so I may reconsider the platform. In particular, theres a lot of AI-generated material on there and I don’t trust the so-called authors to be honest about it.

It seems that each of the ‘communities’ (categories) on Vocal are a bit of an unmoderated free-for-all. Although they’ve recently added a paywall for stories – but only if you pay their annual subscription (also available monthly). They already had the anti-scraping on Vocal, which I do like. And now they have monthly bonus awards too for various categories. I’ve been sitting just under the payout threshold for more than a year! (Because I abandoned it.) If that one earns enough, then I may take out an annual subscription, which is the opposite to Medium so I suppose that speaks for itself.

Anyway, my story *was* published instantly, but it did take time to format. It wasn’t as easy as Medium’s formatting. 

I finished the first stage of the dates work. I went through with a yellow highlighter pen and chose 5 stories I wanted to keep for myself and then went through with a blue highlighter pen to find 30 suitable story ideas, including the one for Take One Idea, for the article. Then I put it all away to cool for a week to see if they still excite me by the time I get around to writing it up.

As I hadn’t heard from the publication on Medium yet, I went to check out their latest stories to make sure they’re still accepting the same kinds of things. It looks like they are but it also looks like they’ve shifted their focus to Substack, and I’m not on Substack any more.

I did 2 things their updated guidelines asked for (tag the publication and make sure the picture caption is correctly linked). The first one was easy. The second one less so. Eventually I did a Google reverse search on the image I’ve used since the story was first published anywhere, and fortunately I found it. So I updated the caption and closed it down. 

By now it was starting to get dark and we were ready for our tea. It’s a busy day today, so I closed down to give me some proper down-time in between.

Have a super weekend!