Blog Stuff: Twitter & YouTube

I remember a few years ago, when Twitter first started to become a thing among bloggers, there was a lot of discussion about whether it was replacing blogging or whether it was merely a complementary form of communication. I've certainly seen some bloggers "disappear" onto Twitter in my time. However, regardless of whether one thinks that Twitter contributes to the death of old-school blogging or not, it seems to have become pretty widely accepted that having a Twitter account for your blog is a thing, even if you only use it to promote your blog posts. Personally I held out for quite a while without one, but by now more than two and a half years have passed since I created my own. These days I see very few holdouts that blog without having a Twitter account as well.

I've come to accept it, but I have to admit that Twitter still hasn't grown on me. It's just too chaotic, which is why I can't bear to look at my Twitter feed for any length of time. Random cat pictures are mixed with real life announcements and gaming achievements, and it's just too hard to follow any kind of narrative. I guess I could see how it might be entertaining to look at on your smartphone during your commute on the train or something like that, but I don't have a smartphone and when I'm at my desktop, with the option to play a proper game or blog, Twitter just feels like a waste of time most of the time.

I'm not even sure it's that great for blog promotion to be honest. I can see that I get a fair amount of traffic from it, but I'm not sure how "valuable" those clicks are. What I mean is that there have been times when I've posted the link to a new blog post on Twitter and got people replying to just the headline, blatantly showing that they hadn't bothered to read the actual post. That kind of thing is a bit disappointing.

Sometimes genuine readers also decide to reply to the post via Twitter instead of via the comment section, which always makes me a little sad because it limits discussion, and unlike the comments on the blog post, which are stored with the post for as long as the blog exists, Twitter responses tend to disappear into the aether and are hard to track down later on.

Still, there are some perks to using Twitter as a blogger. Sometimes when I'm having a moment that makes me feel like shouting out into the world, without having enough to say to make a blog post out of it, Twitter does the job quite nicely.

That moment when you pull the mods out of an item to do a legacy transfer, and accidentally end up putting them back into the same item.

— Shintar (@ShintarCommando) June 28, 2015

Also, while I find that you can't communicate very effectively via Twitter, it is great for simply connecting to other people. The #SWTORFamily hashtag is a great example. Whenever I find a great blog post somewhere else, it's nice to be able to share it around by re-tweeting, even if I don't have anything else to add. Twitter is also a great source of SWTOR community news... such as that Njessi of Hawtpants of the Old Republic is back in game, woo!

In other news... YouTube! I can't believe it's been over a year since I last posted a video here! I still enjoy making them but have been somewhat starved for time since I started working full time, and video-making can be quite time consuming, even if the result is very basic. However, until very recently I also had an even more pressing problem: lack of disk space. I had to give up creating videos of our operations boss kills because every couple of attempts my hard drive would be full and I'd have to go delete things again or stop recording... but you never know which attempt is going to be the succesful one! It just didn't work.

Fortunately this has been resolved with a new disk which is currently solely dedicated to Fraps and lets me record things to my heart's content again. It's just a shame that I can't promote them more because YouTube broke Blogger's YouTube sidebar widget some time ago. You can still see the newest videos by going through the Google+ page on the sidebar or straight to the channel page, but of course updates are not as prominent there as they were on the widget.

Here's our latest "new" boss kill, featuring some eighties rock! Surely you can't go wrong with that?