Tag: blogging

Christmas season and blog stats

I don’t know exactly how all those online shops do during the Christmas seasons (probably they are blooming), but I can show you what two weeks or so of Christmas and New Year’s holidays can do to one’s blog statistics.  Here is a screenshot of weekly stats for my blog:

Weekly stats - Christmas edition

X-axis shows a few last weeks of 2007 as well as a couple of weeks of 2008.  Y-axis shows the number of visits this blog had for each of those weeks.  A home-made red marker with a word “here” tries to bring your attention to the celebration of Christmas and New Year represented on this graph.

As much as it was expected, that was quite a dive I must say.  Reasons?  I’d say there are only two:

  1. Many people are busy with shopping, celebrations, travels, and other holiday matters.  Mostly off-line.
  2. Many companies closed their offices and that minimized many employees’ access to the Web.

Gladly, things are rushing back to normal.

Blog 365 initiative

Via Web Worker Daily I learned about Blog 365.  That’s a nice idea which I heard and did before, and which I think is still valuable enough to bring attention to.

More and more people are joining the blogosphere every day.  More and more people ask the same questions over and over – “how can I improve my blogging?”, “how can I get more comments?”, “how can I promote my blog more?”, etc.  To all of them I answer – Blog 365.

You see, the hardest part of blogging is … actually, blogging – thinking about things, finding things, preparing content, and posting it.  You can have all bells and features on your blog, and it can be search engine optimized to no avail, but if you don’t publish any posts, nothing will matter.  Most blogs get lost and disappear because they don’t get updated anymore.

Now, if you are new to blogging, then posting every day may sound like a hard job to do.  I’ll tell you a little secret – it is, but for just a few weeks. The thing here is to make blogging into a routine.  Once your brain understands that it has to produce at least one post every day, it will start looking for and creating content by itself.  You won’t have to do anything, but pick the bits that you like better and write them down.

I did a “have to publish at least one post every day” experiment a few times myself.  The longest one was, I think, in 2004 and ran for about a year and a half.  My posts varied from thoughts, notes, and simple links to somebody else’s pictures and videos.  Eventually, I got it into my system.  I had no problems posting something every day.  Even better than that.  There was a period of time when I felt uncomfortable if I didn’t publish anything.

Sure, I did my share of polluting the web with crap that nobody cares about.  But that was all for the better.  Here are the benefits from the top of my head:

  • my English got better.  Much better.
  • my touch-typing  got better. Much better.
  • my Google skills got better. Much better.
  • my reasoning got better. I learned that if I say something, I might be asked for a reference, so I learned to check those references before I was saying anything.
  • my blog got more popular (more incoming links, more and better search engine results positioning, more people coming in and staying, more comments)
  • my understanding of many social (people, communications, other cultures) and technical (Internet, blogging tools, search engines) topics improved a lot.
  • I found a few more friends (not as in “close friends”, but as in “people with who I enjoy talking a lot”) that I wouldn’t have met otherwise.

These are just a few.  There are many more.  Like all those archives that I can search through and cross reference now…

So, if you are interesting in blogging, the Internet, or communications, take my advice – join the Blog 365 project.  It’s much easier to do this with several other people, than alone.  They understand what you are going through and how tough it is during the first few weeks.  They’ll help you out with ideas, tips, links, and comments.  You’ll get more out of it than you can imagine.  We all will. Just give it a try.

Blogging is a skill.  It’s like tough-typing, programming, riding a bicycle, or driving – you can read all about it you want, but you won’t get any better until you’ll sit down and start blogging.  A lot.  So, here is your chance.  Take it!

It’s not only about the source

Mashable reports that source code for Movable Type is finally open sourced.  Movable Type is a blogging platform competing with WordPress, LiveJournal, and others.

These are, of course, good news for open source community.  The more open source software we have, the better.  And Movable Type is a somewhat high profile piece of software.  It used to be more popular a little while ago, and then many of its fans moved to WordPress and other alternatives.

One thing I wanted to note together with these news, is that it’s not only about open source.  Just putting up the code out there for the general public to grab and modify it is not enough.  It’s about the community too.  Someone has to lead, support, and inspire people to try, test, develop, document, and praise.  Someone has to listen and react.  This last part is one of the most difficult tasks in open source development.  And there are plenty examples to prove it (just look at most of the stuff at Freshmeat.net or SourceForge.net).

WordPress guys are terrific at driving their community.  With Six Apart manage to compete with that?  We’ll see…

Blogging with Google Docs

If, for some reason, you don’t like the editor of your blogging tool (WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, etc), you have a few options to consider.  Those of you hosing your own blogs, can always try a plugin or two.  WordPress, for example, has a number of plugins which either add pieces of functionality or completely replace the default editor.  Alternatively, you can try an external editor.  That is, you can use a piece of software which is not a part of your blogging platform, for writing posts.  There are Firefox plugins (ScribeFire, Xinha Here!), standalone applications (w.bloggar, Windows Live Writer, and more, and more), and web services (Performancing.com) that do this.

Today I was reminded, that one can even use Google Docs for this purpose.  Create a new document or spreadsheet, edit it all you want and then publish it straight into your blog.  That’s how easy it is.  (You’ll need to configure a few simple settings the first time you do so though).  If it sounds interesting, check this post at Blogopreneur.com fordetailed instructions.  If it sounds interesting, but you are not sure if your blogging platform is supported, check out this list of supported platforms.

Me? I am happy with WordPress built-in editor.

On blog comments

Mark Cuban asks an interesting question:

So the question is, is it worth it to allow unmoderated comments ? Or is babysitting comments just part of the job of bloggers ? Or are comments just a waste of time under all circumstances ?

Here is how I see it.

Your blog is like your house.  In your house, you have some rules.  You don’t have them written anywhere, but everybody follows them.  Like, do you take off the shoes when you come in or if you are allowed to smoke inside.  How loud can you speak and can you bring kids or animals with you.  You know your rules.

People, who are coming in for the first time, they don’t.  There are some etiquette rules, generic for everyone, that will almost always keep you on the safe side.  Like, don’t swear until somebody does it first.  Or ask for the permission to smoke.  Stuff like that. When people come to your house for the first time, they keep it on the safe side.  They observe how you and others behave.  They ask if they need something.

This  is pretty much how comments on the blog are.  When people come to the blog, they would usually read others comments before posting their own.  They start with simple, straightforward ones.  They grow slowly.  If they do something that you don’t like, you let them know.  It’s OK.  Most good people won’t need more than one correction.  They can understand and feel the atmosphere of the blog and of the discussions.

Of course, the more popular the blog gets, the more morons will come.  Inconsiderate idiots who will feel an obligation to annoy and offend the heck out of everybody else, they will post insulting comments to a few entries in the archives.  They will come back for more…

Give them a warning.  Once.  If you are in a good mood – twice.  If it’s not your day, you can skip the warning altogether.  Then just ban the troll. Filter them out. They aren’t worth your time. They aren’t worth the time of your blog’s visitors.  The sooner you’ll get rid of them, the better.  Don’t be afraid to hurt their feelings – they don’t have any anyway.

I like the way WordPress handles comments.  It gets rid of SPAM automatically.  It sends me comments from unknown users for moderation.  If I allow a comment from someone, all further comments will be automatically approved, unless I ban the user.  If I will ever be overwhelmed with moderation of comments (not likely), I always have an option to go for “only registered users are allowed to comment”…

As to the Mark’s question of the value of comments – yes, I see plenty of value in comments.  Comments is not the main reason for me blogging, but it’s a pretty important one.