3. What shall we use to fill the empty spaces?
Now that we've gone into album reviews in some depth, what's left? What else can you fill your journal up with? Well, the answer is everything. Or nothing. Depends on you. If you want, your journal can consist of nothing more than album review after album review. This might be seen as boring, predictable or unadventurous, but if you choose this path just make certain that you do the best damned album reviews you can, and no-one will mind. You may even become the place to go, the go-to guy or girl for people wanting to read album reviews.
3a: Do it good
But if you want to do more, do more. There's no holding you back. I've got about sixty different sections to my journal, with at least twenty more waiting in the wings. How did I think of them? Well, various ways, but most of the inspirations came from listening to music, how it's played, how it's written, how it's presented. Things will jump out at you from time to time, perhaps things I would never have thought of. Team-ups. Debut albums. Live performances. Songs that are special to you. Music from the TV. There are, quite literally, infinite things you can write about. You can choose a particular artist, and concentrate on writing the best review of their work that you can. You could relate your experience at gigs, or maybe the musical tradition, if one exists, in your family tree. Or your own national music, perhaps.
Like I say, literally anything. Just make sure that whatever you decide to do, you give it your very best shot, and then even if no-one likes it, you can be comfortable that you put in maximum effort. But if you do that, it's likely that someone, possibly lots of people, will like it, and read it. You don't even have to have a set format for your journal. Many people don't; they write as they feel like it, posting what they want to at any given moment. Almost a stream of consciousness, if you will. Do whatever you want, just bear these important points in mind:
1. Do it well, to the very best of your ability
2. Make sure it's well researched, if research is required: check your facts
3. Do it with pride and passion and
4. Make in interesting to read.
Follow those guidelines and you should be well on the way to writing something pretty damn good. And don't worry if you fail in your first attempt, or seem to. If your journal seems about as busy as a lift in a bungalow, don't despair: give it time. Not every journal starts buzzing from the first entry. Give your posts time to be read, and noticed, and maybe commented on. And if this doesn't happen, just plough on with your next posts. Someone, somewhere will eventually comment, and even if they don't, it'll have to be a pretty poor journal if no-one at least looks at it, so keep checking those views.
3b: Picture this
I personally seem to be one of the only ones doing this, but you can make your journal more aesthetically pleasing and eye-catching by using graphics, images and pictures. It's very easy: just find the picture you want, copy its location as we showed you in the album review tutorial, stick it between two image tags (that's one “img” and one “/img” in square brackets, as shown below,
or if you prefer, select the “insert image” icon from the top right of the “Reply” dialogue as shown (the one that looks like a postcard or letter, six in from the right).
Type in manually or, preferably, paste the image URL, but this time without the http:// part, since as you can see that's already been done for you
which will then give you the below text.
Whichever method you use, hit the “Preview” button and you should see something like this:
I tend to make my own images, mostly as headers for the various sections I run, and you can do that too, or you can search for images online that reflect what you want to post: a disc perhaps for album reviews, a silhouette of a man and woman for duets, or whatever. Do however be alive to the ten-image restriction placed on all posts. Also understand that if you make your own images, you will need to upload them either to your own website/FTP server, as I do, or to an image-sharing website. Either way, they have to be online and you have to have the URL to make them work: leaving them on your computer will not allow them to display here.
Of course, you don't have to use pictures at all. You decide yourself whether that suits your style or not. But the above just shows you how to do this, if you decide to go down that route.
3c. Basic structure
For those of you familiar with HTML, be aware that the tags used in this forum are slightly different to those you would normally use to highlight, bolden etc text, or centre images. Well, essentially they're the same, but you'll need to get used to using square brackets around these commands instead of the usual, HTML-standard left and right arrow. Many of the tags used in basic HTML will work here, though not all, like B for bold, I for italic, U for underline, CENTER for, well, centreing, and so on, but if you place them in the HTML arrows they won't be recognised, so if something doesn't work for you, consider checking back that you have used the proper square brackets.
Other than that, structure your writing as you would normally. Have spaces between paragraphs, don't let sentences run on too long, and try to arrange your text around the YouTube videos you use so that you don't end up with, for instance, ten lines of text, one YouTube video and then two words of text after that. A little care and experimentation will show you the best way to go. Oh, and paragraph codes don't work: you have to do it the old-fashioned way, ie hit the return key and leave a line space.
Things can be made stand out by usage of the font, color and size tags, again available from the top menu when you post (see the tutorial on headings for albums in the very first post). You can see this in action here, where each subheading is done in a certain font, colour and size so that it stands out from the rest of the article. The number of fonts on tap is limited, but there are a few decent ones there, and you can use many colours to enhance them. So for headings, important notes, titles, quotes, anything that you want to draw more attention to than the basic text, remember the font tags.