A dozen years!

WordPress called my time tapping at the keyboard with their platform an achievement. I started this blog 12 years ago, their A1 apparently flagged them. My start was cautious. I didn’t even take photos. Or use clip art. All I knew was that after getting laid off by the big daily with four decades of…

Tag!

You’re it, da. I’ve long thought myself bowed out of these blogging games. I’ve put enough years in clicking and clacking away to avoid the tangled webs, indeed. But yet, it was (beth kennedy – ididnthavemyglasseson.com) who laid the tag on me from her blog a few days ago. She was one of the first…

Am I interesting times seven?

Emily of Author’s Canvas nominated me for the Versatile Blogger Award. I’ve had the No Awards, Thank You sign up around these parts for a while now. Five years blogging and counting, there came a time when I’d had enough and wished for the awards to go elsewhere. But because Emily is new in BloggyVille…

I can help figure things out, Dooley noted

The question came from my Syracuse-area blogging friend Ermine. She wanted to change things around on her too-dormant WordPress site. She didn’t want to change the whole domain and lose the followers she’d built. Could I help? I’ve made enough alterations here since starting markbialczak.com in February 2013 that I agreed. So she came over…

A pleasant surprise from many miles away

It wasn’t the usual piece of mail I get in my box at my workplace, the Liverpool Public Library. The envelope was addressed to me, and it declared that it came from across the miles. Inside was a Christmas card, bookmark and beautiful message. The sender was a fellow blogger. New Bloggy Cat, also known…

The real payoff: Meeting Beth in person

I feel as if I’ve known Beth from I Didn’t Have My Glasses On forever. She’s been my friend in BloggyVille forever, one of the first people I met on WordPress, a writer of special note, a photographer of fine image, a person of great wit, a person fun and smart and easy to be…

My swing at the 6-word challenge is borderline

I was scrolling through my Twitter feed the other day, and a six-word challenge from writer.ly hit me over the head like a two-by-four. I had to take a crack at the topic: Crossing the border. Because something non-fiction came to my mind. Not the type of border crossing that most people would think of…

2015 in review: The little daily lives

To get to the helper monkeys’ point: Write on! The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog. Here's an excerpt: The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 94,000 times in 2015. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take…