Suggestions for Blog Name(s)
 

I've been posting on MobileRead for more than 6 years now (how time flies), and I'm almost hitting my 1000 post milestone!

Now I need some help from the MobileRead community.

I have two ideas for new blogs, and I am the worst at coming up with good names.

Blog #1

This will be a technical blog discussing the nitty-gritty details of ebooks.

It will be a compilation of all my ebook knowledge on various topics.

There will be in-depth technical posts such as:

• How to Generate Higher Quality Formulas
  
  • https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh....php?p=2634159
• Finding and Correcting Hyphenation Issues
• Clean up Speckling in PDF scans
• Indexes in Ebooks
  
  • https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...43#post3474243
• Why Insert Covers in SVG Wrapper?
  
  • https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...60#post3661160
• How to Convert Greek Characters
• Why Use HTML Lang?
• PDF->EPUB Workflows
  
  • https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=234146
• [...]

The blog will also include links to things that ebook creators would find interesting:

• My Reviews/Summaries/Thoughts
  
  • One of the initial posts is going to be quick summaries/reviews of all the ebookcraft 2018 talks
    
  • Interesting developments in the ebook space (like Web Annotations).
    
• Articles I find fascinating
  
  • When Nothing Ever Goes Out of Print: Maintaining Backlist Ebooks
• Useful Plugins/Tools
  
  • What I use to clean up InDesign cruft, etc. etc.

Every post will include detailed discussion and references to my backlog of MobileRead posts.

Blog #2

This will analyze books/authors/series using a variety of methods:

• n-grams
• Word/Character Counts
  
  • With graphs!
• Longest Sentences
  
  • + Average Words per Sentence
• Most Common First Word
• [...]

and point out any other interesting stats that appear.

Words/Characters per Sentence

For example, I could compare Words per Sentence across a series:

Brandon Sanderson's epic fantasy series, Stormlight Archive books (Books #1-3):

Attachment 164176 Attachment 164177 Attachment 164178

Another epic fantasy, Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time (Books #1-3):

Attachment 164182 Attachment 164183 Attachment 164184

George R.R. Martin's A Dance with Dragons (Book #5 of A Song of Ice and Fire):

Attachment 164188

Or a popular science fiction book, Andy Weir's The Martian:

Attachment 164185

Top 50 Words to Start a Sentence

Or take the first 3 books in the Wheel of Time:

And I want to preemptively thank everyone for any and all suggestions.

This community has meant so much to me over the past six years, it completely transformed my life, and I can't wait to get the ball rolling on these two projects. :thumbsup:

A few for #1 --
Breaking Down the Digital Word
Love Words to Bits (or just 'Words to Bits')
E-Book Wrangler
Byte Your E-Book

For Blog #1

Behind the text

For Blog #2, BetterRed recommended this:

Lingo Metrics

I think it's fantastic.

Blog #1:

Thanks so much for the suggestions Pablo + Penforhire.

"Words to Bits" sounds great!

But doing a search on Google, you get flooded with hundreds of thousands of hits on programming. I'm thinking it would be hard to find a blog through that jungle.

Words to the Wise

EWords to EBooks

That one led to:

Ew, did I really say that?

Wonder Words


I'm not convinced you need two separate blogs, although I guess it depends on how often you think you'll be able to maintain both.

I agree with this. Why not just have a single blog that has categories? Tagging, word clouds, whatever? I mean, from my own experience--and I tried this nearly a decade ago, when it was less crowded than it is now--maintaining ONE blog is a big pain.

EVEN FOR YOU, Tex, and your mind-bogglingly prolific self, snookums. Wouldn't it make more sense to just do different posts on different topics, when you feel like it?

Hitch

Thanks for the suggestions gmw.

I see Blog #1 being relatively more general:

My thoughts on ebooks.

I see this appealing to people who hang out in the technical sections of MobileRead, and the occasional fellow traveler (people searching for solution to Problem X, people who like my MobileRead posts, [...]).

So ebook creation + ebook-related topics of interest.

Where Blog #2 will be heavily specialized:

Ripping apart books and looking at stats.

While there would be overlap (many of the technical people would probably be interested in the stats)... this would be more just analyzing specific books.

No coding discussions, not talking about the general ebook-world, etc.

As the body of posts grows, a reader would then be able to look through the specific areas you are interested in:

• Genre: Fantasy/Sci-Fi/Detective
• Author
• Decades
• [...]

I think that kind of stuff would just completely clog up Blog #1 if they were both merged. And I (currently) see them as having two distinct readerships.

PS. Speaking of super specific stats stuff, there's the Lord of the Rings Project covering the Lord of the Rings books...

I think that Blog #1 would cover that. Different ebook topics when I feel like it.

PS. I think I get what you're saying... you're saying I need to become even more prolific? :rofl:

I have an awful feeling that the distinction may be more important (and apparent) to you than to your audience. A bit of skipping over items of less interest is common to internet browsing.

If it was me, I'd keep it all on one just to avoid having to come up with two names! :o

As someone who has worked with professionally with blogs and websites (maintaining them) for more than a decade*, I heartily agree with gmw, who suggested having one blog.

Websites are hard work. Honestly. So, unless you've got at least 30 posts planned for each and will be actively stockpiling more, consider one blog. It's not as though you've got two totally different topics - they are related. Using tags & categories (and a bit of say, Wordpress whizbangery) you can easily present the information in one blog but keep the content distinct. Also, it could be a cool way of introducing the two topics to each other (e.g. how to nicely display stats etc in HTML).

But content is king. And you'll need lots. If there's not fresh meat often and regular, people just stop coming. Trust me. If I had a valium for every new website I've had to build for someone that "needed" it (instead of incorporating their information into an existing site), I wouldn't want to punch the TV so much when commercials come on. I hate commercials. A lot. Except maybe ones with puppies. And ducks.



* OMG I think it's actually two decades. I'm not sure how that happened!

From the blog name generator https://www.name-generator.org.uk/blog/

Confessions of a Formatting Freak

At the Drop of a Format

Format Got Your Tongue?

Tex 's Not-So-Secret Diary

The Tex Journal

Too Texy for your Shirt


Hitch

Thanks for the suggestions Gregg. I'll have to take a look at that generator.

Too Texy for Your Books! :rofl:

Well, "Lingo Metrics" is fantastic for the secondary blog. But if I incorporate it all under one umbrella, I still need a great name for the overarching site.

So you're saying you are ancient and very wise for your years? :rofl:

The technical portion would be much slower paced (maybe a biweekly/monthly post). I would want it as an ultimate resource on Topic X... and it takes time to dig through the backlog and reread+gather all the posts on a given topic.

The bulk of the time would be spent hunting down URLs and linking everything, plus coming up with proper examples/images (when I wrote my Formulas Tutorial... WOW, taking good screenshots took forever).

Most likely there would be short->medium-sized posts based on new/old material:

• Like gmw just brought up Asterisms (⁂), which lead me to re-find a book I read long ago, Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols & Other Typographical Marks.
  
  • I also run across strange characters in my book-conversion travels, and love digging through the depths of Unicode. For example, I pushed for proper Symbol/Wingdings/Webdings->Unicode support in Toxaris's EPUB Tools + Calibre.
• There are tangential topics through my emails with authors.
  
  • How do I tackle Problem X?
• And I'm always converting new books, so running across little nuances and fresh problems/examples on my own.

= = = = =

The statistics blog:

I could take book suggestions, and randomly pick and choose from books I've seen mentioned on MobileRead/Reddit. I also think tackling books in a series individually + together would be interesting.

The stats can be generated relatively quickly, and there are always more books to test. Once the methodology is down flat, the same analysis can be applied across books pretty consistently.

Then it's just digging through and trying to find what interesting quirks I could dig up, or new ways to look at old data.

Lately I came up with a method to break things down on a per-chapter level, so I could generate a chart like "# Words per Chapter" across all three Lord of the Rings books:

Attachment 164486

Have you seen my posts? :D

Blogs don't have to be linear, you could run two strands. For the techie strand I'm thinking maybe a wordplay around the Linotype machine - how about Digital Slugs.

For the actual blog, how about- A Texan Hacks . . . eBooks

BR

Tex, when talking to an Editor buddy this afternoon I mentioned my suggestion for Digital Slug, and the context; she informs me that 'Slug" also has relevance in Newspaper production, and Screenplays.

BR

Yes, it does; and in layout, a "slug" is an area in which you put information about the layout or document you're doing. ;-) Not totally inappropriate for a blog. Although, "Too Sexy for my Slug" probably doesn't have that good old clever name ring to it.

P.S.: Not from Texas.

Hitch