So?
If you hate it, just tell me. It takes two seconds to change it, and the themes are free.
I just feel ready for a change.
Category: blogging
Should I Back the Blog Up on WordPress? Or Move Altogether?
After the Blogger collapse last week, Blogger is still not functioning properly. Several widgets on my blog are not working and it takes longer than usual to load. The Dashboard has been working poorly for several weeks now. Other people who blog with Blogger report continued issues with posting and commenting. After the unpleasant experience of Blogger being down for 23 hours last week, I have realized that I don’t want to remain without my blog. I love blogging with a passion and want to continue doing it for a very long time to come. I’m only just getting started here, and I’ve got a lot more things to say. A real lot.
So I’ve started thinking that maybe Blogger should not be relied on. I read that there is an option to export one’s blog to WordPress and leave it there as a back-up option. In this case, if Blogger goes down again, readers will simply go to the WordPress version and continue reading there. Or is it a stupid idea?
Or maybe I should move the blog to WordPress altogether? Are there any distinctive advantages that WordPress has over Blogger? Or is it an even more stupid idea?
Does it make sense to buy one’s own domain name? What are the benefits of doing that?
Please help, people, I’m torn and confused. I’m placing a poll in the top right-hand corner and will also be grateful if you elaborate in the comments.
>Copyrighting Blog Photos
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What I find very weird is that many people go to the trouble of posting angry warnings that all photos on their personal blogs are copyrighted and shouldn’t be used without the owner’s permission. I’m not talking about any kind of artwork here. Just regular, completely unprofessional photos everybody snaps on a daily basis. I don’t know what possesses people to feel so protective about stuff that they choose to post online.
As for me, if I post a photo on my blog, this means that I want people to use it. If somebody finds my clumsy pictures useful for any purpose, that’s great, I’m happy. Free exchange of information is the best thing about the Internet.
>Promoting Yourself on My Blog
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To those who are new to Clarissa’s Blog: you can only promote your own blog here if I have given you express permission. Ending each comment with a link to your own blog will make your comments end up in a spam box. However, if I have told you it’s OK to place your link here once, the permission is good for all future occasions when you might want to do it. If I come to your blog and comment there, it means I like you, so you can place your links freely. If I really like your blog, I will do all I can to promote it on my own because I love sharing cool stuff with people.
I also don’t publish comments from people whose nicknames promote products and link to sites that sell stuff. If you want to buy advertising on my blog, contact me and we’ll see if something can be worked out. But I really hate it when people try to sneak one past me. Nothing annoys me more than when people baselessly assume that they are smarter than I am and will be able to dupe me with such cheap tricks.
>Canukistani’s Blog
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One of the most assiduous readers and participators of this blog who is known to us as “Canukistani” now finally has a blog of his own. The blog is called Northern Gaijin and has kicked off its first week of existence with posts on Žižek, Lori Gottlieb (the author of a manual on how women should settle for whomever wants them lest they be left all alone), American history, Fukushima, and other fascinating topics. There are great videos, pictures, and interesting posts.
>Why I Unfollowed Your Blog
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I just cleaned my blogroll by unfollowing many of the blogs that I used to follow. I know that people are going to whine about how mean I am, so I will explain once and for all why I unfollowed them. There is a blogging etiquette that one should be aware of if one has been blogging for years. Of course, it’s anybody’s right not to follow the rules of this etiquette but then such people shouldn’t complain that they are losing followers.
So these are the reasons why I unfollowed you:
1. You are rude. If I followed your blog out of the goodness of my heart just to give you a single follower, the least you could do would be return the favor. I don’t care all that much about the number of followers. Many of my best readers can’t be followers because they don’t have their own Blogger profiles. I do, however, care about manners. When somebody does something just to be nice, you reciprocate.
2. You keep inundating my blogroll with endless posts explaining why you haven’t blogged in a while and promising to write soon. This is simply disrespectful of a person’s blogroll. Who has the time to sift through excuses in search of actual posts? I certainly don’t.
3. You think that the fact that I followed your blog and left a few nice comments entitles you to persecute me with unsolicited advice on how to improve myself as a blogger, academic, and a human being.
4. You censored my comments that didn’t have a single disrespectful word just because I expressed an opinion you disagree with politically while inundating everybody with posts on the importance of free speech. Hypocrite.
5. You are boring. People who know me in real life are aware that there is nothing worse I can say about a person than that they are boring. Every other defect can be forgiven and compensated for but boring people I simply can’t stand. I’m willing to give anybody a chance to prove they are not boring but a time comes when the truth can no longer be denied. I can’t see any more boring posts in my blogroll.
6. You posted one too many photos of your cat. I can vaguely understand why people might love their cats. What I don’t understand is why I should be expected to follow a blog that publishes a dozen posts with cat photos one after another.
As a result of these purges I now have only 203 blogs in my blogroll. This is not a lot since most people publish seldom and interesting posts are hard to find. Out of all these blogs I follow, I read very few on a regular basis. As for the rest, I just keep hoping that they will finally produce something worth reading but that almost never happens.
>Frustrated with Blogger
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Blogger is living a life of its own today. Half of my gadgets don’t work, including the great “Random Posts” gadget that is very helpful in introducing people to my old posts. The “Followers” gadget has also been dead. I futzed with the template for an hour, trying to get the gadgets to work. Then I noticed that other blogs that use the Blogger platform have the same problem today.
This is really annoying. I have observed that there are several moments during a year when you can increase your blog readership dramatically. January, March and August are the months when readers seem to roam the Internet in droves looking for new blogs to follow.
See, for example, this graph of my blog stats from January 2010 until today:
See what happened last March? The readership grew from 3,973 to 7,398. After a long and painful struggle with my rusty memory of what I learned about percentages in fifth grade, I think this means that the readership grew by 86.2% in that one month. (I’m mathematically challenged, so please correct me if I’m wrong here.)
Of course, now that the gadgets are not functioning properly, I’m not sure there will be a rise in readership this March. And that annoys me.
>Is This the End of the Internet?
>There is this website that everybody was linking to a while ago that said “Sorry, but you have reached the end of the Internet. You can’t go any further from here.” (Here this website is, if you are curious.) Sometimes, it seems that people have confused my blog with that site.
I just received yet another long e-mail containing a bullet-point list of everything that is wrong with my blog (content, writing style, even the excessive frequency of my responses to other people’s comments) and an equally long list of suggestions as to how I can improve my bad blog. Of course, the question remains of why this person who knows so well how to write a good blog doesn’t just write one of their own.
I’ve received quite a few of such missives and I have to tell everybody who’s been trying to improve my blog: I’m sorry, people, but it is not extremely likely that I will change everything about the way I blog in the foreseeable future. The good news, though, is that this is not the end of the Internet. If everything on this blog annoys you, you can always move on.
>Random Posts Widget
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I just added a Random Posts Widget to the blog. It brings up posts from the past on a random basis, showing how many comments they got and allowing to read more from the posts you find interesting. These widget reminded me about some of the posts that I wrote a while ago and forgot about completely since then. I think this widget is cute, but feel free to tell me if you hate it. Also, if you know of other curious widgets supported by Blogger that you’d like to see here, let me know.
P.S. I can see that the new gadget is really popular by the number of visits it got. A tip: if you refresh the home page, the gadget will bring up different posts every time. Enjoy!
>How To Promote Your Blog, Make It Popular, And Attract Readers
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I have only been blogging for 19 months and before that I knew nothing whatsoever about blogging. So I’ve been really reluctant to write this post. I have finally decided to write it because I received so many requests from my readers to share the “secrets” of this blog’s popularity that I couldn’t resist any longer.
I’m sure there are many things that more experienced bloggers know about this. Also, I don’t have any time to follow the regular advice dispensed to beginner bloggers to promote their blogs on Technorati, blog carnivals, webrings, etc. As it is, I spend from 30 to 60 minutes every day answering blog-related mail and another 60 to 90 minutes moderating comments. And then there is also answering comments and actually writing the posts. There are days when I spend up to 8 hours on blog-related activities. And that’s on top of my full-time job. So scouring blog promotion sites is really out of the question for me. The advice I can give mostly has to do with what you can do within the blog itself to make it easier for readers to find it and keep coming back once they do. Once again, I don’t pretend to be any kind of authority on this. This is what works for me. If you have any suggestions of your own, do leave them in the comment section.
1. Mind the titles of your posts. Many people go out of their way to come up with fun, snappy titles for their blog posts. I’m sure that this strategy makes their regular readers very happy, but it also makes it very hard for new readers to find the blog. The best thing for the post title is to be as descriptive as possible of what the post contains. Think about the search phrase that people who might be interested in this post will enter into their search engine and design the post title accordingly. You will end up with long, boring titles, but also a bunch of new readers every day.
2. The length of the posts matters. In my experience, posts should be neither too long nor too short. If a reader followed a link to your blog and found a post that is just 3 or 4 lines long, it is possible that they will feel disappointed and won’t come back. At the same time, excessively long posts bore people. Visitors might not even begin reading the post if they see it is too long. I suggest breaking up a longer post into 2 or 3 parts.
3. Guest posting might be counter-productive. Several bloggers shared with me something that confirmed my own experience: more often than not, inviting guest bloggers to post on your blog decreases readership. If you do it more often than once or twice a year, the readership might decrease dramatically. Even if your guest blogger is very talented and writes a lot better than you do, people don’t want to read their posts on your blog. (That is, unless your guest blogger is some kind of a huge celebrity, but how often does that happen?) If readers come to your blog, they come to read your posts and they feel disappointed if you offer them somebody else’s writing instead. As your blog becomes more popular, you will start getting offers to guest post more and more often (I receive at least one a day.) It might feel like accepting these offers will give you more posts, which will end up in bringing in more readers. In reality, it works the opposite way.
4. Make the blog easy to understand for new readers. As in any relationship, you will end up developing a language of your own with your long-standing readers. Some bloggers tend to forget that this language is incomprehensible to new readers. Sometimes, you read a post and have a feeling that there is a lot of interesting history behind it, which is not comprehensible to readers who haven’t been to the blog before. Before you publish the post, read it as if you were a first-time visitor. And then change it in a way that will make the post easy to understand to anyone who has never been to the blog before.
5. Don’t limit yourself in the choice of topics. I know this advice is contrary to what many blog promotion sites suggest: just choose a topic and stick to it. There is an important difference between blogs that are trying to sell something and blogs that aren’t. My blog isn’t selling anything. Of course, it’s nice when people go to Amazon through this blog and buy what they need, but it was never the point of the blog. Nowadays, I receive offers to place paid advertisement on my blog about every other day and, for now, I’m resisting these offers. As a result, I can write about absolutely anything I want, and the blog has a chance to attract different kinds of people with a variety of interests.
6. Write often. I know that you must have heard this a hundred times before, but it’s a truth that bears repeating. I know that I feel quite annoyed when my favorite bloggers
7. A blog is not the same as a Facebook page. Posting tons of photos of your friends and of every event you attended is only of interest to the people you know. If you have no desire to attract readers who’ve never met you, go ahead and do it. However, if you want to increase your readership beyond the circle of your immediate acquaintanceship, I suggest you move all that personal stuff to Facebook. As a reader of your blog, I have no interest in knowing what your friend’s friend looks like when she is drunk and I don’t find looking at 15 pictures of your kitten throwing up on the carpet all that fascinating.
8. Follow the buzz. At any given time, there is a subject or two that’s on everybody’s mind. Identifying such a topic and writing about it while it’s still hot will bring an explosion of readership to the blog. For me, that has always been the most difficult strategy to follow because I never have the time to stay updated on what everybody is watching on YouTube or tweeting on Twitter. However, as your blog becomes more popular, you will discover that your readers will do this work for you. If you have received three requests within the hour to discuss a certain subject on the blog, it might be a good idea to look into it.
Clarissa's Blog 