Blogging Art and Practice

In my sidebar under "Pecking Order" I used to have a Top 100 Gardening Sites badge. It was an amusing way to keep track of how I stood in relationship to other gardening websites--or so I thought. Recently, a quick check of Garden Rant's Sitemeter revealed that they had far more visitors than this website, [...]

As I mentioned recently, I'm going to Oklahoma City this fall to participate in a panel discussion on garden blogs. Yes, these professional writers, accustomed as they are to newspaper, magazine, television, radio, and even marketing work, are a bit intimidated and confused by blogging--so I'm told. Some are downright misinformed. So, along with Mary [...]

Colleen of In the Garden Online is starting the Mouse and Trowel Awards, a program "to give recognition to those bloggers, website owners, and retail outlets that add vibrancy, convenience, or pure eye candy to our world." Nominations are currently being accepted. Finalists will be announced on April 13th, and winners announced on May 13th.

Some photos are more interesting when cropped severely So many people expressed admiration for the header images that I decided to put them in the Cold Climate Gardening Flickr pool. You can view them here. It is a challenge to find images that are still interesting once you cut them down to 780x140 pixels. On [...]

Boredom isn't enough to motivate me to redecorate my walls or my website "Why are you changing your design?" some of my children asked, as I was making preparations for the Big Day. I could have said, for the same reason many people re-paint their walls or buy a new dress: tired of the same [...]

Horticulture Magazine has jumped on the blogging bandwagon. Managing Editor Meghan Lynch and Executive Editor Sara Begg are both giving it a whirl. At the moment, though, you can't get to them from the website's main page. How dumb is that? The only reason I even found them is because I subscribe to the email [...]

Many of you know I keep a listing of garden blogs on this site. For some of you, it was how you found me. It's an indication of how our little corner of the blogging world has grown that two more blog directories specifically devoted to gardening blogs have shown up. I found Dig in [...]

We perceive something to be technology only when it is still new and, like most new things, not quite working the way it's supposed to. Nobody thinks that the wheel is technology, though it's as important a piece of technology as humanity has ever invented. . . . It is when people stop thinking of [...]

Several weeks ago on Garden Rant there was a small storm of indignation regarding the attitude expressed at a garden writers convention that what bloggers write was free for the taking without attribution. Most bloggers are flattered to be quoted, but instances of entire posts being republished somewhere else without permission, or even acknowledgment, are [...]