One of the things that I'm a bit envious about with Google Blogger is the sense of community.  Part of this is because everyone can comment on everyone else's blog using their current credentials, and don't need to create a new login and account for each new site.  This is a bit harder to do in Wordpress, but the Gigya Sociable plug-in helps by allowing you to login using your existing Blogger/Facebook/Twitter, etc account and comment.  You'll notice the new links to the side.

I've also created a Facebook page.  For a while I wondered how a Facebook page would contribute, when I already have both a blog and a static webpage - but I think Facebook is naturally social, and updates populate across friends' walls automatically.  I've changed my mindset to realize that the blog, webpage, and Facebook page each have a different purpose and voice, and it's all about connecting more with people.

As an aside, I was thinking about the development of my own art career, and how much it was affected by the internet and social websites.  Participating in art forums like Scribbletalk really opened up my eyes to a much wider range of approaches, supports, techniques, and styles, and commentary from the artists gave insights I could never get from browsing a static site.  The distinct speckled look of my current style is due much in part to drawing on Colourfix paper, and I didn't know Colourfix paper existed before seeing Nicole Caulfield's and Ranjini Venkatachari's work on Scribbletalk.  My latest piece, Opaline Dreams, which used, in part, Neocolor II's, was also due to seeing work completed with Neocolors, and a desire to experiment.   And of course, if you're reading this, it's because I spied several artists using Wordpress, and decided to give it a whirl.

After visiting Janet Pantry's site, I noticed the artist blogroll was live - it had the most recent post of each blog along with a thumbnail.  This appears to be a standard widget in Blogger, but unfortunately in Wordpress it's somewhat hard to do.  After a bit of tinkering with plugins and code, I've updated the list on my site to follow suit (like all computer tasks, this was strangely harder than I expected).   I like that, instead of a static link list, it's a dynamic list of current content.  Hopefully it will generate some more clicks to the sites of the artists I've linked, and give them a bit more traffic.  Of course it's also nice for me to log on and see the latest from all of my favorite blogs at a glance. For those with Wordpress blogs interested in setting this up, I used the Advanced RSS plugin and created a custom template.  Once you install the plugin, just go to the settings page, click "Create New Template", then replace all of the code on the template page with mine.