My Last Blog Post The Magic of Blogging

My Last Blog Post: The Magic of Blogging.

Gavin Wren Blogging

Hello my dear friends.

Two months have passed since I last published a recipe on my blog and I want to explain why. There are no excuses about being busy, or despair over increased demands of life making blogging hard. I’m going to tell you the exact reason why I started blogging, why I’m going to stop and some words about the exciting and fulfilling project that I’m refocussing my time upon.

I nervously began Le Petit Oeuf in July 2014, utterly petrified of pressing ‘publish’ on my first, highly inoffensive blog post. I was a hobby photographer, with threadbare experience of taking food photos and mortally terrified of putting a profile picture online, for fear of judgement. That’s why the header image for this post is a self-portrait, because I genuinely no longer care what you think, and it’s bliss.

Over three and a half years, I’ve written…come and read more…

creativity creative cart human horse

Is your creative cart behind your human horse?

Gavin Wren Blogging

Horses aren’t very good at walking backwards or pushing things along with their noses, which might be due, in part, to their long faces.

When used to help transport goods or people, horses are traditionally positioned in front of a cart or coach and then attached via a set of leather straps to the trailer.

A coachman, set upon the trailer, is able to direct the horses using a complicated language specifically developed to him sound like part of the English aristocracy, ensuring the cart is pulled steadily and strongly along it’s journey. Ergo, to ensure the success of this venture, it is vital that the horse is placed in front of the cart, rather than behind.

Why am I explaining such glaringly obvious statements of fact around the arrangements and forces involved in joining a horse and cart in union to develop forward motion? Because for many years, I’ve…

Yoast Readability vs 5 Titans of Literature

Gavin Wren Blogging

Yoast Readability

Upon completing the most spectacularly lucid section of prose that my fingers have ever battered into a keyboard, I look across to the Yoast box and see “Readability: Needs improvement’.

My heart drifts south into my belly as these words cut through my soul. A few amendments upgrade the rating to ‘OK’.

BUT I PUT EVERY FIBRE OF MY LITERARY SELF INTO THIS!!!

This phenomenon is all too common unless I pretend to write for a five year old, which seems to be the intellectual level of the internet these days.

To prove my point, I’ve taken excerpts from five titans of literature to see what they can achieve in Yoast readability scores. The utterly hilarious results are below…come and read more…

Ganesha God of New Beginnings

Finding the Heart of my Blog

Gavin Wren Blogging

Why do I blog?

I’m surely not the first to ponder this and I doubt I’ll ever be the last. It seems a rite of passage for bloggers to go through an existential crisis around their future, at some point in their blogging career.

Today, I blog for the same reason that I began blogging, to give me an independent outlet for my creative urges, free of clients and briefs. A place where I can explore my ideas, unleashed from the shackles of outcomes and expectation.

Unwittingly, I may have created shackles of my own.

The Blogging Treadmill

The dreaded treadmill, when blogging shifts from a joyous, carefree path of self-expression into a burden of routine and schedules. The weekly post deadlines, the content planning, the social media scheduling (although I keep this to a bare minimum of three tweets a week, only advertising my…come and read more…

Instagram Composition secrets of the top ten personal style bloggers

Instagram Composition Guidelines from Style’s Top Ten

Gavin Wren Blogging

Have you ever wondered what the key to Instagram success is? What exactly do the big league social media influencers at the top of the game do, which makes them so popular?

This post is a chance to learn from the best, as I delve into an academic study from 2016 which analysed the most common Instagram composition styles and themes from the world’s top ten most influential personal style bloggers.

Instagram Facts.

51% of Instagram’s users are men and 49% women, compared to Pinterest which is 85% female. Instagram also has the most active users, 61% will ‘like’ at least one image every day. 73% of it’s users are between 15 and 35. Some sectors are more imporatant to users than others with fashion sits at the top of the pile, followed by beauty and home decor.

Popular Instagram users can become ‘opinion leaders’, people… come and read more…

Bullied Bloggers

Bullied Bloggers

Gavin Wren Blogging

The State of the Blogosphere.

Bloggers are a funny bunch. There are nepotistic posses, crews and gangs who give each other props, RTs and likes. There are mavericks, out there to speak their truth and to hell with what anyone else thinks. There’s love & hate, lies & truth. We represent an unregulated, free to enter world, where anyone with access to the internet can add their junk to the pile, or put the icing on the cake.

The low barrier to entry of blogging makes it seem like the Wild West at times. There’s no regulation or official body and many of the blogger groups, collectives or award organisers are heavily sponsored by industry, or highly partisan towards a certain niche, meaning their message is ethically dubious and should be heeded with caution. I’m struggling to think of organisations in the blogosphere that are genuinely impartial.

However, there is… come and read more…