For the past year on this blog, I have spent an inordinate amount of time on the design and development of this blog. In many ways, the new direction of the blog was an amazing success. The blog has been updated literally thousands of times with all different kinds of content. The decentralized manner of publishing turned my everyday routines into a form of blogging. However, during same year, I have written a grand total of 18 actual long-form articles. Of those 18, perhaps 10 were no related to the theme development or why I was not actually writing. I knew quickly after the redesign that I missed the mark in a few ways – in one way or another, I have been working on fixing those issues. I believe that those are behind me now with this current revision. This theme has been released in a more generic form which fulfills the promise I made just about one year ago to this day. Which leads me to my next “project”. I want to turn this blog around in a big way. I am aiming to get some serious readership and some serious conversations back on this site. I want to go about doing this in a fairly naive/idealogical manner and I am planning to write extensively about it.
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Posts Tagged ‘blogging’
Click on one of the items below to go to the postFinished. Time To Start Over.
Posted on 2 November, 2009 at 10:31am with 10 comments
This Blog’s Days Are Numbered
Posted on 28 July, 2008 at 9:03pm with 8 comments
This post will have been the 8th blog entry in two months. To put that into perspective, in the month of March 2007 this blog had 34 posts alone. Frankly, this is not surprising – updates have slowly trickled downward for the past 3 or 4 months now. There are a few reasons for this – which I can get into in a later post. However, it has been clear that the current model of how I have blogging up to this point on Some Random Dude is not sustainable, nor is it smart. The effort/reward ratio is just not high enough – and while I was willing and able to a year ago, I am no longer.
The thing that has gotten to me the most is the amount of manual labor it takes to publish frequently. I would post 3 or 4 times a week and the traffic would frankly not reflect what I think it should have. Make no mistake, I am not in the camp that believes traffic is the sole measure of success and value – however, it is important. About one year ago, I started setting goals for what I would like to achieve with this blog – goals that I concluded would only be possible with a relatively high frequency of postings. That notion then put me into the pattern of regular weekly posts which became more of a chore than it should have been. I do not think that there’s no coincidence between the fact that some of my most popular posts were written before I started posting weekly content. In retrospect, I sold-out quality for quantity and I am kicking myself now for that.
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Oh, by the way, I’m Tumbling
Posted on 7 July, 2008 at 8:23pm with 2 comments
I have been holding off posting this for a while for a few reasons, but considering how lack-luster the frequency of posts have been on this blog, I thought it may be a good thing to write about. While my blogging has gone down, I have found I have been publishing in short format much more frequently. My Twitter account is updated pretty frequently thanks to some good tools. I found that the short I-only-want-to-spend-10-to-15-seconds-to-post-something format is something I can handle even when I am busy as hell. Why? Because it is completely valid to write “Busy as hell” as a Twitter post.
This very reason is why I got interested in Tumblr. I feel as though Tumblr can be just like Twitter except with the additional media aspects. Luckily, Tumblr has a couple nice tools for posting as well. I find that Tumblr is the best balance of ease/speed and features that I have found up to this point. As free time diminishes, I see Tumblr (or a Tumblr-esque format) becoming a bigger part of my daily postings as time goes by.
Up to this point, my Tumblr is pretty low-brow and is all over the place in terms of content. Additionally, the site is still rockin’ the default style (which I hope to change soon). However, if you can forgive the above shortcomings, I think you may find it entertaining.
Why No Articles This Week?
Posted on 24 April, 2008 at 9:08pm with 3 comments
So it is a Thursday and there are still no posts on Some Random Dude for this week. What gives? Well, I am most certainly writing and putting together a collection of posts and (believe it or not) real articles. However, I am holding onto them until the month of May where I will (hopefully) be pushing much more in-depth content on a weekly basis than any other month I have blogged. The reason for this is that May is going to be a special month of Comment Love, where the maximum donation will up increased to $100. This means that we will need 200 comments during the month of May to hit the goal. Considering the highest month of comments was a little over 100, I am really going to have to work for those 200 comments.
To get the roughly 50 comments a week, the following must happen:
- I will need to produce some really good articles – probably more frequent than on a weekly basis.
- I will need serious help from readers like you to not only comment, but to encourage others to comment as well
- The month of May must have exceedingly above-average traffic
The only thing that is truly in my control is the first item, so I am working hard to make that happen. If all goes well, I will have some pretty cool stuff coming out in May (fingers crossed). I will be finishing up projects that I swore I would complete and finish articles I swore I would write in order to make this happen. However, to do this, the rest of April is going to have to suffer a bit. I should still be able to put the weekly photograph and the weekly links up, but not much else.
Just a quick update.
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Comment Love for May and June 2008
Posted on 1 July, 2008 at 1:07pm with 4 comments
Well, May and June were supposed to be a big couple months in order to generate enough comments for a special Comment Love project. I dropped the ball – big time. The beginning of May started off really well and then tapered off extremely quickly and I have yet to recover. A couple large projects, a vacation and a continuing battle with burnout have done my blogging in for about a month and a half. I know I will get back on the horse eventually, it just has not happened yet.
All that said, the charities that we were supporting for May and June, the International Rescue Committee’s Iraqi Refugee Program and the Disabled American Veterans Charitable Service Trust were extremely important and I feel extremely guilty that my otherwise unimportant problems got in the way of hitting our goal. Therefore, I decided to donate the maximum amount ($100 to each charity) even though we barely hit half that mark in comments. I really dropped the ball in terms of posting – frankly, I’m surprised we got as much as we did.
The posting frequency will be back up to normal levels soon – hell, just posting this article was a major accomplishment for me in my current state. Ironically, I have been doing a tremendous amount of interesting work that I am really looking forward to sharing. Be on the lookout for posts sooner than later.