No Runny Eggs

The repository of one hard-boiled egg from the south suburbs of Milwaukee, Wisconsin (and the occassional guest-blogger). The ramblings within may or may not offend, shock and awe you, but they are what I (or my guest-bloggers) think.

Archive for March 11th, 2008

Roll bloat – more news (and other errata)

by @ 14:02. Filed under The Blog.

First things first, I do have to point you to Neocon News. I know I’m already pushing well against the number of blogs one can keep track of, but, much like potato chips, I just can’t stop.

I’ve also done some rearrangement of the sidebars, adding a few politicians I back as well as a stat for the FeedBurner feed. I’ve tried to solve the slow load of the StatCounter counter by reinstalling the code, but it doesn’t seem to be helping right now. Sorry about that.

Why don’t more blogs succeed? – Reloaded

by @ 12:26. Filed under The Blog.

Revisions/extensions (12:41 pm 3/11/2008) – Now that Neocon News is back up, I added a bit from that site. I also threw in a couple of parting thoughts.

I probably should just do a revision and extension to yesterday’s piece on the 10 reasons blogs don’t succeed, but since John Hawkins decided to do a fresh post on it, and because I’ve got too much to stick in a revision, I’ll do so as well. Before I get to the meat, I recommend checking out the sites John highlighted today; after all, linkage is the currency of the blogosphere (no, that phrase isn’t mine; my hazy memory says it’s Sean Hackbarth’s).

I guess the initial post was fortuitous timing on John’s part. One could definitely use it as an explanation of how relatively insignificant blogs are according to Harris Interactive, which released that survey late yesterday.

I probably should have been clearer yesterday that “success” was “potential financial success”, not simply being around for a few years. Billiam from View from the cheap seats reminded me in yesterday’s post that most of those that blog do so because they simply want to vent. That’s good because I remembered something that Mark Cuban said at BlogWorld last year; if one isn’t drawing 1,000 hits a day, it doesn’t pay to even try to monetize the blog.

ALa at blonde sagacity makes much the same point. Simply put, do it because you want to. Things are too crowded right now to expect a huge audience, but if you put in your time, you’ll get an audience.

Neocon at Neocon News has a few words of encouragement for the bloggers-to-be. Yes, it can get daunting to provide a fresh perspective by the time you sift through your feed reader, but in the main, the blogosphere is not a “good ol’ boys club”. That reminds me; Drinking Right is tonight, 7 pm at Papa’s Social Club (7718 W Burleigh in Milwaukee).

Kate at small dead animals adds an 11th reason blogs fail – too much vulgarity. I try not to swear, but sometimes my inner Rottweiler/AoSHQ takes over, and I unleash Hell. I generally try to not have that show up on the feed, but each new version of WordPress tends to scramble the hacks I use to bury the vulgarities some. Besides, Ace, the Emperor, and Bill Quick have made names for themselves with a “few” choice words (not that I recommend it; the market is pretty much full-up).

I’m definitely violating Robbie Cooper from UrbanGround’s Rule 2A about not blogging about blogging right now. Oh well; I’m probably also violating the interesting rule (again), but sometimes this has to be done.

If I were a better blogger, I would have gone back to Charlie Sykes‘ old Rule of Five at some point here yesterday (unfortunately, the WTMJ archives for April 2007 got wiped, so the original post got lost). While most of those I know do read more than the 5 blogs Charlie said he read at the time (I’m somewhere north of 150 blogs in the reader) there still is a valid point to the rule. One has to be pretty good and consistent to be read regularily because there just are so many hours in the day.

There’s a couple more suggestions I can add. Don’t make your home page so busy people can’t follow it or load it quickly. There is a certain elegance to simplicity of design. Besides, some people are still on dial-up, so huge graphics will kill the load speed.

Unless you’re doing advertising, please offer full-text feeds. While in many situations you won’t know how many people are viewing the feed (I’ll plug FeedBurner because it does track that), most people keep up with blogs through feed readers, and most feed readers do not offer the option to bypass the excerpt without an additional click.

[No Runny Eggs is proudly powered by WordPress.]