Sunday 9 May 2021

More Writing

Another take away from me on writing on Vocal. As I have said I saw the original adverts for it saying that it would improve your writing discipline and I am always wary of claims like that, but willing to give things a try. A similar thing was with the NOOM diet plan which I eventually found too intrusive with the number of things that I was expected to take on, although I did take a couple of positive things from it and know people who are on the NOOM course and losing weight , but I found it too intrusive.


I was half expecting this from Vocal , but it just seems to be a supportive network and is full of articles about anything you need to know , a bit like the Internet search engines except that the articles are foul articles and not full of pop up adverts and misleading links.


I find the areas to post in is not always obvious and Vocal always manages to file them in a suitable area. I also find the tags not always perfect for what I have written about, but publishing is relatively simple.


The only rules that need to be followed is that your article needs to be at least six hundred words long and it needs to be readable. I once tried an article that I had done by dictating into my phone and it was, quite rightly, rejected.


I have been blogging for fifteen years on SevenDaysIn which I started as a travel diary but is has been taken over by my love for music and anything else that I want to remember. I do publish my articles there , as well as on Vocal as some readers prefer that platform and at the moment I get more visits there than I do here , but I have only been on here for less than a month, but published (when this is live) 32 articles.


This year I had said I would scale down my writing , but Vocal has actually caused me to write a lot more. The other thing is that my articles on SevenDaysIn were mostly around 250 words but obviously to appear on Vocal they need to be longer, so I have not only increased the number of articles I have written , but also increased the content of those articles and I hope the quality is still good enough for an audience to read.


I don’t think in all my time on SevenDaysIn I actually wrote about writing, but here I am on Vocal doing that.


So after this big preamble I now have a system that allows me to produce articles with interesting content in a relatively simple fashion.


I now do not type straight into the blogging interface. I did use Microsoft Word , but now have moved to Google Docs as it is fast , responsive , and lightweight and your documents are always available online, and it is free. I do find it amazing that with the processing power of our computers and devices certain software is so bloated with extra stuff it slows down the device to an unusable state.


When I have finished the article in Docs I choose a header video or picture for the Vocal story and paste the text in to give me the basic article.


When I was looking at Vocal articles I couldn’t work out how to put in links and pictures and videos into the article, but a little experimentation , showed me that if, at the start of a paragraph, I press an up arrow (sometimes twice) followed by the return key a plus sign (+) appears on the left hand side of where the cursor is and you can then add your link to enhance your article.


I had also seen text links and wasn’t sure how to do that, but if you select text you are given the option of changing it to a basic link , as well as a lot of other options.


I hope this points will help you if you are new to Vocal and I am certainly becoming more impressed with the interface and the platform.


As I am writing this I am listening to Fatboy Slim’s “Greatest Hits” and across the front it states “Why Try Harder?” from the cover guy’s T-Shirt , and really when we work we should be smarter so we don’t have to work harder, which means that after work we wil have energy for the things in life that we really want to do. I never knew until today that "Weapon of Choice" with the crazy dashing Christopher Walken video also features Bootsy Collins.


Incidentally I have found this piece easy to write and it has clocked it at more than 800 words. I recently read an article by Adrian Cruce about freelancing which stated the writer was paid $1.50 per 500 in 2001 which they rated a slave labour but now charge ten times that, but the rates still seem very low but that is the nature of the economy at the moment but hopefully we can change that.


You can read the freelancing article here


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