State of the Blog - July 2008

This post may only be of interest to those who are building their own blogs. The study of blogs and blogging has kind of taken over my life lately, to the point where I’m neglecting my own blog as I look in to see what other people are making of theirs. That being said, every day I’m tweaking something, and while it may not be very apparent to anyone who reads this page from week to week, things are slowly changing and my skills keep developing. You maybe can’t tell, but I can.

The weirdest part about having this blog so far is how my traffic keeps trending upward, even as I post some rather, um, eclectic items. Until now the world has been pretty consistent in letting me know that the things that interest me tend to be of little interest to the rest of humanity. But online, things are different. People find you. Tribes sort themselves out. And increasing numbers of people are visiting these pages. The numbers, to be sure, are small, but they are getting bigger, and at a rate that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. It’s not something I’ve expected, but there it is.

Please note: Everything I post here has had some kind of fascination to me (yes, even the Dardanella). I just never expect anyone else to dig the same weirdo stuff. And yet, more and more visits are showing up in the stats. And that’s encouraging.

My new favorite traffic stat is RSS subscribers. If you look above and to the left, you’ll see a little orange icon for those who wish to subscribe to this blog via what is called a “reader.” I only started using one about six months ago and I don’t know how I got along without it. They’re a little tricky figuring out at first, but they makes it much easier to get to web content that you want — “RSS” stands for… actually, I don’t know what exactly, but most people refer to it as “Really Simple Syndication.” Google has a reader — that’s the one I’m using. There’s also a website for reading blogs called bloglines.com. It has another good reader with a friendly interface that’s very easy to read.

Anyway, my point: A couple of weeks ago, I rigged that RSS link to start counting the numbers of people who are coming to my blog via an RSS reader, and as of today, with my little half-assed blog, I have six (count ‘em) six RSS subscribers. I’m one of them, I know who two of the others are, and that means there are three people I’ve never met out there in Webland who are actually following what happens here. They’re interested to the point where they’re having it delivered to them automatically. And that just knocks me out.

Some blogs have literally tens of thousands of RSS subscribers. But these six are mine.

I recommend that you look into trying out an RSS reader. Like, um, maybe start by clicking MY orange button thingie. It’s up there on the upper left just under the header. It could completely change the way you spend your time online.

In a post at the beginning of June I set up a blogging to-do list. Looking back on it six weeks later I can say that I’m pleased with my progress, even if I haven’t completed every item on it. I haven’t set up a contact page, I haven’t updated my About page. But I have improved the appearance of this blog (I know - lots more to do here) and I’ve done a lot of messing around with social media sites. I’ve more than tripled my list of Facebook friends (okay, the number was pretty low to begin with, but still), and I’ve set up accounts on some of the other social media sites. Frankly, a lot of these have not been very enticing to me (Plurk, Twitter, etc.), but I imagine that as I develop a circle of friends on these sites their charms will become more apparent. For now, I’ll keep checking into them on a regular basis, and let my participation grow at a natural rather than a forced pace. Who knows what wonders wait for me there?

More useful to me have been sites like Digg and StumbleUpon. These are sites where people vote for items they find online, and as the votes are tallied, some good web content finds its way to the top of the list. There is some Wisdom Of The Crowd at work here… stuff that gets voted up the lists tends to have something going for it, even if only turns out to be some kind of crude joke. And perhaps one day I’ll actually produce some content that’s worth Digging. We’ll see.

I’ve also been doing a lot of stuff that isn’t apparent here. I’ve been studying a bit of html, and I’ve been looking at some various page lay-outs for blogs. The current lay-out for this blog is a WordPress theme called Tarski, which I’ve found simple and clean, if not ideal. One day I’ll know enough about this stuff to get things the way I want them. Until then, the world of blogging has endless fascinations, and the written word is only one aspect of it. I’m looking forward to spending a lot more time noodling around with this stuff.

And that’s my report on my progress to date.

Oh, and one last thing: I’ve actually earned some money with this blog. Yes, after three and a half months of heroic effort, I’ve banked a whole $2.71.

This bodes well, yes?

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