Humor Blogging Makes it’s Return

First, I would like to thank those of you who remained subscribed to Humor Blogging. I know that it’s been more than a month now since I’ve updated the site.

I could throw out some excuses for this. I could claim that I’ve been too busy, work has been a bear, or that I’ve been sick. I could say that aliens abducted me, and forced me to stay away from the site, under threat of anal probing.

None of that would be true. The fact is just that I’m a bit flaky when it comes to staying dedicated to things that require effort.

Maintaining a blog takes serious work

I suggest anyone that has bought into the notion that they will somehow earn easy, passive income from blogging reread that header. Then read it again. Take your time. In fact, make it a mantra. Meditate on it for a few moments.

Better yet, don’t get past the header until it sinks in all the way.

Have you completely disabused yourself of the notion of easy money yet? Good. Now we can finally continue.

Bipolar Blogging

It’s tough to overcome the effects of being bipolar. The lows obviously make it difficult to do anything at all. During those periods, I’m just exhausted, and struggle to get through the day.

Less obvious in it’s difficulty are the upswings. You might think it would be the greatest thing on earth to have dozens of ideas , but it’s not as wonderful as it would seem.

I recall reading about studies that show that when people are given a choice of two options, it is easy for them to make a decision. When a third choice gets thrown into the mix, the participants become crippled with indecisiveness, and choose nothing.

Too many choices creates a short-circuit in the thinking process.

Violent Acres recently had a good article on the effect of too many choices.

For example, I could have sat down and penned you all a nice update to read. But in order for me to do that, I would have had to forsake my volunteer work. Meeting with an architect to discuss the facility I’m planning to build was another option of mine. But in choosing that, I would also be choosing not to look at a property I’m interested in buying. Faced with a long list of choices, all equally enjoyable, I mentally froze.

This is exactly the struggle I have with having so many ideas.

Great things coming to Humor Blogging

I resolve to put a better effort into maintaining this site in the future. I owe it to the outstanding, brilliant, and talented individuals who have inquired about, or agreed to contribute to it.

Top notch writers, like Diesel from the Mattress Police, and Clay Pigeon Humor Magazine, who wrote a guide on How to Write Funny.

Stay tuned, because soon Brent Diggs of the hilarious Ominous Comma will reveal the Secret to writing Humor, and you don’t want to miss that.

And I mean that in the most threatening manner possible.

Image Credit: A fine Cigar by Steve Burt

If you subscribe to Humor Blogging by email or RSS subscription you can be sure to see it first.

Humor-Blogs.com has many funny writers as well.

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That knot in your stomach is a sign you’re doing something right.

Jon Morrow, of On Money Making, wrote a guest post on Copyblogger giving the 7 Warning Signs That You’re Drunk on Your Own Words, which compares the state of creative flow to being drunk.

For professional, business oriented blogs, his column offers rock-solid advice. It’s also a perfect illustration of one of the reasons I started this site.

Sites like Copyblogger are targeted almost exclusively towards business, marketing, and those using their blogging to leverage or create a business. Almost no attention is paid to the needs of those of us that merely wish to entertain.

Although Jon’s advice is might work well for business oriented bloggers, I think that it’s wrong, and potentially harmful, when it comes to those of us who have the primary goal of providing entertainment value.

I’ll give Jon his third point about actual intoxication, since I don’t wish to endorse substance abuse. It can result in a crippling and debilitating state that revolves around seeking the next fix.

Having granted Jon his one point, to me the remainder of the list looks like six signs of a creative flow. From that I’ve created a response.

Six Signs You’re Writing Something Remarkable

1. You think the post is brilliant
Trust your instincts. Too often we second guess ourselves, seek out flaws, and find reasons why we can’t do it, instead of trusting our intuition.

2. You think the post is hilarious
As an aspiring humor writer, I have to say this is a rare and a highly desirable occurrence. Writing humor can often be so analytical and strategic. If it can make even you – as the author – laugh, it’s gold.

3. Your heart is pounding
This is a side effect from a rush of adrenalin, induced by being totally engrossed in the moment. This is when the best ideas come and creativity explodes.

4. You can’t wait to see how people react
This is your enthusiasm overflowing. You want your audience to feel the joy and passion you feel. That’s an admirable quality.

5. Your stomach tightens up
You’re reaching outside your comfort zone. This means you’re experimenting and growing. You can stay where it’a always easy and comfortable, but I don’t recommend it. That path leads to stagnation.

6. You hesitate before clicking “post”
Hit it! This is the anxiety we all feel when we push our limits. As was noted recently at – of all places – Copyblogger, Fear is the enemy of creativity.

Do yourself a favor and hit the publish button

Don’t let fear stand in the way of excellence. I’m not against making money blogging. I’m all for it, but I contend that entertainment sells. Just ask Perez Hilton or Google, YouTube anyone?

There is an important difference between blogging as a sales tool and blogging to entertain. One hopes to connect with the audience to gain their trust so they can sell something, because that means more money. The other hopes to connect with the audience to connect with the audience because it’s a huge endorphin rush.

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After 3 years of blogging at Radioactive Liberty, I reached a point where I wanted to improve my writing skills. More specifically, I wanted to become a better humor writer. General principles of good writing apply to humor writing as well, and they are easy enough to find, so that’s where I started.

When I tried to take the next step of finding information on how to be funny, I was met with frustration. I was able to find bits and pieces of information about common tools of humor, but no one really seemed to have put it all together.

It’s quite likely that it’s the sort of thing that has always tended to flow from one person to the next through a personal mentor/apprentice type relationship. That’s probably a pretty effective way to provide beneficial support to one person, but isn’t particularly helpful in an age where people are inclined to search for information on the internet.

I’m fully aware of many of the devices used in writing humor, such as

• exaggeration
• stereotypes
• ridicule
• recall
• wordplay

to name just a few, but it just didn’t seem right to continually be given pieces of a great puzzle, a little at a time, and need to figure out how it all fits together.

Hasn’t anyone come up with a formula to use as an effective tool?

I remembered that Scott Adams had mentioned a tool he uses to measure how funny something is. He even uses it as a template for his work. He calls it the 2 of 6 Rule of Humor, and I assume he invented it.

The 2 of 6 rule basically states that when something hits at least 2 of 6 broad categories, then it’s probably funny. The more categories it hits, the funnier it is. If you could hit 5 of 6, you’re probably making people piss themselves.

2 of 6 Rule of Humor
The 6 categories in the 2 of 6 rule are:

• Clever
• Cute
• Cruel
• Naughty
• Familiar
• Bizarre

The order doesn’t matter. The point is that implementing a minimum of two is a key to making something funny. That’s all well and good, but those terms are kind of broad and vague. It took a while for it to sink in. Over time, I started seeing how the common devices of humor fit into each of these categories, and I started to realize just how effective a tool it can be.

I plan to cover this topic more in depth in the future.

Was all the funniest stuff on the internet written in 1995?

I hope to Hell the answer is “No,” because I’m sick of seeing the same old non-funny shit that’s been perpetuated through the internet since the days of usenet.

Thankfully, I know the answer is “No.” I can see for myself the many talented individuals cranking out new and seriously funny writing on a daily basis.

It’s great that we have things like the Humor-Blogs.com directory, but it just doesn’t seem to take the idea far enough. It’s nice to have a directory of blogs that are intended as humor, and to allow for feed aggregation of publishers that have joined, but there really needs to be more of a community aspect to it.

In some way, I have a goal of helping bring that into existence. I encourage talented individuals to contribute their original ideas to be showcased here at Humor Blogging.

Isn’t blogging more than just internet marketing?

Of course it is. In one way or another we’re all marketing ourselves, and our writing, but just look around the Meta-Blogging community, and over and over you’ll see people ignoring the value of entertainment. It’s like people got this idea of using blogging to get rich quick, and forgot the importance of just having fun.

Let’s reclaim the importance of fun, laughter, and enjoyment for the good of the blogosphere. Let’s collaborate together to become better humor writers.

Let’s make an effort to promote talented individuals that write truly funny and original content, because that stupid picture of the kindergarten class with Bill Clinton’s face on all the kid’s wasn’t that funny the first 17,000 times I saw it, and it’s making me want to start strangling people by now.

That’s why I started this site. Something I wanted to exist simply didn’t seem to exist. I couldn’t find it, so I created it.

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Image credit e=mc cuadrado

When I first started blogging, I had a blog on Blogspot. I didn’t pay any mind to anything beyond selecting one of the templates available by default. Then I just started posting.

Nearly 3 years ago, I moved Radioactive Liberty to it’s own domain. I bought my domain name and hooked up with hosting from Midphase Hosting. They installed WordPress for me. Everything was ready to go, except that it wasn’t. There isn’t much that you get by default with WordPress, and I had no idea what the Hell an FTP was, or how to use it.

Von Ralls to the rescue!

Thankfully, Von Ralls, helped me with everything I needed to know. He showed me how to get set up with FTP and how to use it. It turns out, the hardest part is knowing how to set it up to connect, which still isn’t all that difficult.

Beyond that, it’s really just a file browser that allows you to manage files on your server, as opposed to your hard drive. In fact, I now know that you can set up your file browser to connect to your server via FTP.

I’ve come a long way in 3 years. I’ve even helped others set up a website from scratch, and maybe as we go along, I’ll cover some of that here.

Over time, I learned about installing plugins, upgrading wordpress, search engine optimization (SEO), keywords, and much more. I guess the natural and slow progression of implementing new features and acting on new knowledge with Radioactive Liberty distorted my image of what it would take to get a site off the ground, when starting from nothing. It’s taking significantly more time and effort than I expected

Even the act of moving RL to it’s own domain wasn’t exactly the same as starting from the beginning. In the process, I imported every post I had written while on my blogspot blogs.

Right off the bat I had hundreds of posts in my archive. As I write this post for Humor Blogging, I currently have one single, solitary post published. This will be the second.

What 3 Years of Blogging has taught me

Thankfully, once you’ve gained experience, there are benefits that can never be taken away. Let’s take a look at some of the mistakes I’ve made, and some of the things I’ve done right this time around.

Learning from Experience

Post Slug in URLs – When I started RL, I used the default permalink structure. At first I thought it was cool to have a URL that was nice and short. I didn’t think anything about SEO, but I also didn’t consider the user need to hover a link and have an idea of where they would wind up if they followed the link.

This time I didn’t mess around. One of the first things I did was change the permalink structure to include “post slugs.” The great thing about WordPress is that you can edit the post slugs, so you can still have a neat and short URL if you want to .

Look at my introductory post. The URL is http://humorblogging.com/blog/welcome/ That certainly isn’t a long, awkward, ugly URL, but it’s also descriptive. Best of all, a reader can have an idea of what will be on the other end.

Descriptive Post titles – Using descriptive post titles is good for the search engine results, but it’s also good from the human user perspective as well. It may be hilarious to title a post, “So that’s what it means,” when you put it in the context of the entire post, but will it get read in the first place with a title like that?

Perhaps loyal readers will read it, but it’s unlikely those following a search engine result, or a social media submission will. Be clever within the post. Be descriptive with the titles.

Formatting – I’ve learned to write for reading on a computer monitor. Unscannable blocks of text lines without sub-heads, boldface, or line breaks may be the way the teachers said to write in school, but it’s not conducive to writing on teh intertubewebs.

Dedicated Blog Page – I’m planning from the start to grow the site into more than just a blog, which is something I never considered when I started Radioactive Liberty. If you typed http://humorblogging.com/ into the browser, you’re redirected to http://humorblogging.com/blog/ In the future I will create a proper homepage on the top level domain.

Unfortunately, I had trouble knowing how to redirect this. Von Ralls to the rescue! Again. Von helped me out with the necessary code to redirect the top level domain until I can build a professional looking landing page.

Feedburner – Right from the start I added my feed to Feedburner, and redirected it with the Feedsmith Plugin so I can track the stats of my feed subscription.

Sitemap – I’m using the Google XML Sitemaps plugin to create a sitemap. It lets search engine bots see all your posts on one page, so they can fully index your site. I’ll cover more plugins in depth in the future.

Finally, I’ll finish with a new lesson learned. It seems no matter how much you learn, there are still mistakes to be made.

Check Your Plugins

When I got everything set up, I installed all my plugins, and noticed that I was getting an error from the database. It said something about no wp-categories database. For some retarded reason, it didn’t occur to me to simply deactivate my plugins one by one and see if one of them was the source of the problem.

Instead I wasted a lot of time deleting all my WordPress files, deleting my database, creating a new database, and reinstalling WordPress. The end result was that I wound up with the exact same database error message. I wanted to literally throw my computer, but then it hit me.

Maybe it’s a plugin. You think? Way to go Wile E. Coyote: Supergenius.

I deactivated all my plugins and refreshed the page. No error message. I re-enabled them one by one, refreshing the page each time and looking for the error message. It turns out one of the plugins was causing the problem, so it remains deactivated. If I would have thought of that in the first place, I could have saved hours of time.

What mistakes have you made, and what have you learned from your mistakes?

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Just as Manbearpig is half man, half bear, and half pig; Humor Blogging is half humorous posts, half meta-blogging, and half meta-humor. That is to say that Humor Blogging is a delicate and carefully measured combination of original humor, discussion of blogging, and an exploration of what makes “teh funny,” er – Funny.

As the site progresses, I hope to bring to you reviews of humor media, interviews with humorists, and plenty of original material. There will be guest contributions and a solid foundation of my own work.

Humor Blogging is dedicated to providing you with only new and original creations, as we work towards developing ourselves into better humor writers.

Pleas let me know what you would like to see featured, offer to participate with a guest post or interview, or request a review by using my contact form.

I look forward to the challenges and rewards this site has to offer.

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