Suggestions for Blog Name(s)

[Tex2002ans]

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):



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



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



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



Top 50 Words to Start a Sentence

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

Book #1			Book #2			Book #3
25586	Total		22482	Total		20586	Total
2332	The		1963	The		1718	The
2006	He		1623	I		1546	I
1204	I		1450	He		1302	He
817	Rand		868	She		931	She
694	It		670	It		617	It
625	You		663	You		586	You
594	A		607	Rand		483	And
472	She		467	And		449	A
441	And		415	A		369	If
441	They		410	They		357	But
403	But		389	If		313	There
392	If		384	There		310	Egwene
365	His		365	But		309	They
340	Mat		289	We		308	What
339	There		274	What		260	Perrin
301	What		270	No		217	No
273	We		237	Egwene		215	Mat
263	No		205	That		204	Nynaeve
245	Not		197	His		202	That
238	Perrin		190	Nynaeve		200	We
224	In		176	As		197	His
216	As		170	Not		182	Light
211	Moiraine	153	Mat		173	Her
209	When		151	Loial		169	As
205	That		146	Hurin		158	For
197	Egwene		142	Her		144	Not
194	For		141	In		141	When
160	All		138	Ingtar		135	Why
159	With		126	Even		128	Do
158	Even		126	When		121	Elayne
155	Lan		121	For		120	Perhaps
144	At		118	All		118	Even
140	Well		118	Moiraine	116	Moiraine
138	Nynaeve		118	With		106	Rand
126	Its		117	This		102	One
126	This		115	Light		102	This
122	Maybe		110	Why		101	In
119	Her		104	One		96	With
118	Some		103	Perrin		89	Burn
118	Then		101	How		85	Or
116	Why		99	At		83	How
107	One		97	Do		83	Well
107	Thom		95	Well		82	All
104	How		93	Min		78	At
103	Just		87	Yes		77	Yes
99	Master		85	Verin		68	Are
97	Im		84	Its		68	Thom
96	Light		84	Then		66	Now
95	Only		77	So		65	Some
90	Or		76	Perhaps		65	Then

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.

[Penforhire]

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

[Pablo]

For Blog #1

Behind the text

[Tex2002ans]

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.

[gmw]

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.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by gmw

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

[Tex2002ans]

Thanks for the suggestions gmw.

Originally Posted by gmw

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 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...

Originally Posted by Hitch

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?

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?

[gmw]

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!

[skb]

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!

[Gregg Bell]

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

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Gregg Bell

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

[Tex2002ans]

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

Originally Posted by Hitch

Too Texy for your Shirt

Too Texy for Your Books!

Originally Posted by gmw

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

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.

Originally Posted by skb

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

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

Originally Posted by skb

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.

[...]

But content is king. And you'll need lots. If there's not fresh meat often and regular, people just stop coming. Trust me.

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:

Originally Posted by skb

But content is king. And you'll need lots.

Have you seen my posts?

[BetterRed]

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

[BetterRed]

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

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

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