Today’s blogging 101 prompt isn’t a prompt.  In fact it doesn’t even require a post to your blog.  Weird, huh?

Today we are being asked to follow five topics in the wordpress.com Reader (think of it as an RSS feed specific to wordpress.com) and to follow five blogs.  Sounds easy enough.

You follow a topic by entering a tag into the Reader page.  It then spits out posts with that tag.  Seeing as I am tagging this post with Blogging101, and the photo posts with photo101, I will start with those two.  Done and done.

I was a little disappointed to see the results of photo101.  Most of the first batch of posts that were returned used photographs that were not taken on the day of the post.  Granted, no where in the rules does it say you have to take today’s post’s picture today, but I’ve been doing that so far, and I hope to do it for the whole month.  (having said that, I make no promise that any given day’s post will be made on the actual day the prompt is given.  I absolutely reserve the right to push things off until I can get somewhere to take an appropriate picture.  I’ll try to keep things in order though)

So what other tags can I follow in Reader?  I actually already have about a metric ton of topics followed, but I can add a few more.  RPM Challenge and FAWM are already there.  I wonder if rpm2015 is too.  That’s the official 2015 RPM Challenge twitter hash tag.  Turns out the only posts are mine.  What about audio hosting sites.  Will there be anything for soundcloud or hearthis.at?  Again, I am the only person to tag a post with hearthis.at, but soundcloud has a bunch of hits.  That’s three, even though I hate soundcloud.  Oh, what about GarageBand and Logic Pro?  Done and Done.

As for the five blogs I will follow.  Well, none of your business.  When looking at GarageBand posts I did stumble on an RPM participant.  That’s one.  While looking at Logic Pro I found someone who used the light bright looking Moonenite that caused such a terrorism scare in Boston a few years ago as a profile picture.  That’s two.  The final three will all be people who posted photo101 pictures today. Then I’ll add a sixth blog for luck.  Someone who has entered a post about Boston.

Done and done.

Assignment number two in blogging 101 is to edit my page’s title and tagline.

Ummm… No.

I like the page’s title and I like the tagline too. Sure, I made them both up without giving them any thought on the day I opened the account, but they’re mine. Know what I mean?

I had two Blogger pages. One public, one private. They were called “The Importance of Being Rob” and “The Inside Scoop on Rob”. Both seriously stupid, but probably less stupid than Inside the Red Head’s Head. The tagline, “Things that go on in Rob’s weird brain” is probably the single most accurate thing I’ve ever written on this page.

Rob is weird after all. Therefore ol’ Robbie won’t be changing his title or tagline any time soon.

I signed up for something a little cheesy. WordPress.com offers a set of “courses” in things like blogging and photoblogging. For some unknown reason I went and signed up for a month long thing called Blogging 101, and another called Photography 101.

The way it works is each weekday you receive a prompt and you post something based on the prompt. Simple, right?

The photography course is probably going to be interesting. The blogging course would have been interesting if I took it years ago, but so far the prompts are things that I’ve already done.

The first prompt is called Introduce Yourself to the World. Well okay, I’ll play along with this one.

I’m Rob. I’m six and a half feet tall with red hair that is a little whiter than it was yesterday. I’m 43 years old. I’m married to Jennifer. I could talk about Jennifer for days on end. She is the love of my life. She is everything I ever dreamed I would have in a wife, in a partner, in a friend. She makes my world go ’round and no matter what I do, no matter how I try to express it, I will never be able to adequately convey to her just how much I love her and how much she means to me.

My beloved wife has two children from a previous marriage. I will not give their names. Many years ago I was blogging on myspace and I was posting pictures of the kids and giving details about their day to day. One day my beloved wife decided that I needed to stop. There were horror stories of predators on myspace and I decided that I would never again show a photograph or give any news about anyone under 18 years old. So that’s that. When Jennifer and I were married in 2009 her two kids became my two step kids. What was already guaranteed to be the happiest day of my life became the happiest day times three. I am honored and blessed and thrilled that they allow me to be a part of their life. I love them as if they were my own. I can’t imagine being prouder of two people.

Everything else about me is secondary. I work for a software company as a supervisor of a team of programmer/analysts. I play the guitar. I enjoy photographing the holy hell out of everything I see. I have this goofy obsession with writing bad songs and making home demos. A few months ago I joined a band. It had been almost 10 years since the last time I played in a working band. I feel like I am way behind the other three guys, but it’s getting better.

I started blogging using Yahoo 360, then shortly after I moved over to myspace. Lately I’ve been going through the process of moving all of those old myspace posts here. After myspace, in November 2008, I started using Blogger. At the time I thought that I would try to post at least once a day. That quickly ballooned to an average of three times a day. In December of 2012 I moved to wordpress.com. I have mostly followed through on the posting every day, usually multiple times a day, but recently I have been missing the odd day. That might be what made me want to take the blogging 101 course.

What else is there? Well, I don’t know. You’ll just have to see what the prompts for the rest of the month ask me.