Category: Blog

Blogging Lulls Begin Insidiously

Andrew

You fail to blog by blogging to fail. Or failing to plan. Or deciding that you’ve got a bunch of projects occupying your mind and you can’t even begin to reckon on a subject for a post. Or, you don’t actually decide that, it just becomes the default and then you’re seven days into the month and you haven’t written anything and how could this happen and what is wrong with your COMMITMENT, BRO.

And sometimes you get one of these meta-posts started and suddenly you’ve come up with a real subject for it and you can transition into it and your meta-post just looks like a prologue, and then you can change the title and it actually becomes that. This is not one of those times. I am producing a post bereft of content, and I am fine with that. It is a truthful depiction of reality. Thus it is not actually bereft of content. I should write all my blog posts like this, so it can resemble a LiveJournal from 2008. That would be Throwback, but not so Throwback as to be obviously Trendy Nostalgia.

This means that we have reversed the polarity on Nostalgia. It used to be that Cool Nostalgia was aimed at stuff from 20 years ago, and stuff from 10 years ago was so lame we were pretending we had forgotten it. But that would mean being Nostalgic for 2001 now, and we’re still sniffing around the pre-Internet era. Who can even describe 2011 culturally? It was forever ago, and also yesterday. The whole century is going to be like this.

Even complaining about it has become lame. There’s no solution for it, except making something new, that excites people. No one wants to risk the capital for that. Or rather, they haven’t figured out how to do it, yet. Tenet was an attempt at that, but it didn’t take. So maybe the Stuck Culture that others have lamented is like the Trench Warfare of WWI. Nobody likes it, everyone’s trying to solve for it, but they haven’t figured out how yet. We’ve not had our cultural stormtroopers yet. And we probably won’t like that when we do.

Now I have started blogging about something else. Should I change the title?

Nah.

Good News Everyone: The Grand Deletion Has Worked

Good News Everyone: The Grand Deletion Has Worked

Andrew

Content Blues has had a better year in 2020 than in any year since its inception. The number of pageviews is up, as is the number of unique visitors. And its done this with relatively fewer actual posts than in previous years. Quality over Quantity has been the goal since The Grand Deletion, and it seems to be paying off. All this new growth has come Since that redesign.

One thing I’ve done is give myself benchmarks for posting. Quality over quantity is all well and good, but the non-updated blog is not read. My benchmark has been 10 posts per month, and so far that seems the right balance in terms of creating something worth reading. This puts me in mind of what Scott Adams talked of in How To Fail At Everything and Still Win Big: System vs. Goals. True, “write 10 blog posts a month” is more like a goal, but as it’s a doable goal, it becomes more easily systematized. Momentum can build.

Another thing I’ve noticed has been a small shift in traffic sources. In years past, I’ve often relied on one big post driving in a bunch of traffic. So far, there have been big traffic-pullers, but the ratio is not as wildly in favor of a single post. So while my Red Letter Media vs. William Shatner post has been a consistent draw, it’s not the only one. That is gratifying.

So while I haven’t quite grown the audience as I want to just yet, but these last few months have show that it’s possible. And I’ve still got three months of 2020 to go.

The Grand Deletion

Andrew

My initial plan was to make changes to this site subtly, but visual issues with the theme required a new look, and when combined with the scale of the changes I’ve made on social media, that became more appropriate. So, in brief, let me relate what’s happening:

  • My Tumblr blogs are deleted. Every Damn CD is hereby inactive. I’m going back to listening to my music instead of reviewing it.
  • My Podcast, Thumbs Down/Thumbs Up, is undergoing changes. When I decide on a new format, I’m going to post it here, instead of through Podbean. The Shallow & Pedantic Podcast will continue without changes.
  • An ancient blog project, The Teacher’s Dictionary, which withered on the vine, has finally been executed. I may revive it in another form later on.
  • My Facebook Author page has also been deleted. It was more of a firewall than anything else, and my Facebook no longer requires a firewall. Posts will continue to be shared on my normal Facebook page.

Other things, of no interest to anyone here, have likewise gone the wayside. Whatever merit they had, they did not achieve the success I wanted. Reading Cam Newton’s Deep Work (a book I recommend) has made me consider concentration rather than multiplicity as the thing most needed in a blog. A million cross-postings are of no value if I cannot drive the traffic here.

I’ve been through these changes periodically in my long history of blogging; reaching for the new in order to combat the frustration of feeling like you’re shouting into a void. What I haven’t done is get the right content under the eyes of the right readers. Hence, quantity must take a back seat to quality. Nothing else matters.

Thus, what I intend as the final form of this web site, and my career as a blogger. I’m making this statement publicly, as a promise to hold myself to. This is a blog about writing, about content creation, and about aesthetics thereunto pertaining. Beauty is truth, and truth, beauty. And all that cal.

Read on, friends.

The Grind of Blogging

Andrew

Most bloggers burn out. There isn’t much reward for it. One talks about it in terms of grind and struggle, but it’s entirely voluntary, as everything on the internet is. So a grind that can end with no real cost… just by stopping? I get it.

I think the trick is to match expectations with reality. Blogging regularly is the first step. “Smash the damn keys,” as Christian Mihai put it. A couple hundred words a day is a good and doable goal. It’s a grind, it’s unlovely, but it doesn’t have to be genius every day. It’s your window on the internet, and you have to maintain it.

The problem can often be “I don’t know what to write about”. I can get bored pretty easy just commenting on what others have written, which is what I did for a long time. So you really need to write about you: what you’re seeing, what you’re doing, what you’re reading. That’s a perspective, rather than a member of the Internet peanut gallery. As an artist, as a philosopher, as a human, you have something to say. It doesn’t matter if it gets hits or not. It doesn’t matter if it becomes a virus. What matters is that it gets said.

Keep the churn going. “Essay” means “try.”

Podcasting is Going to Be a Thing.

Andrew

As the post below shows, I put a new episode of my long-dormant podcast up. I did so for two reasons:

  1. I Have Things To Say Beyond The Scope of This Blog. Recent event have made me toy with having things to say on the subject of politics, but I don’t want to turn this into a politics blog. That was exhausting and felt futile. The world doesn’t need another politics blog, and I don’t want to write one. But if I start writing on that topic, I’m not going to be able to stop. I’ve done all this before. A podcast, particularly Thumbs Down, Thumbs Up, has an open format that I can weigh in when I want to, without feeling obligated to.
  2. I Can Do It Regularly. This recent episode took me very little time to get up and running. I decided to do it, did it, and uploaded it in the space of an afternoon. With a modicum of prep-work, the quality of each episode will improve without costing me too much time.

I’m not gonna set a rigid schedule for it yet, but I want to stay current, and inertia is the enemy of work. So watch this space.

Vacation

Andrew

I went on one.

I saw mountains and rode with Blackfeet.

And I got photographic evidence to answer the eternal question.

Bears do, in fact, poop in the woods.

More content starting tomorrow.

When Blog Posts Expand

Andrew

I’ve had this draft about the organizational differences between the Army of the Potomac and Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, and I was working on it yesterday. The detail involved in it is turning into a minor essay, which is making me wonder if I should take it off WordPress and publish it to Kindle on its own. I may or may not.

These things have a way of getting away from you sometimes.

Thoughts on Hitting my Thousandth Post

Andrew

Yesterday’s post was number 1,000. Which doesn’t mean a whole lot, but there was a moment there when I wasn’t sure that was going to happen.

I started blogging, over on Blogger, in 2003. I stopped my first blog in 2007. I started again, with two blogs, in 2009. I stopped that in 2011 and moved over to WordPress, with one blog, attached to my name. I almost stopped that in 2016, but did a rebranding instead.

If you examine my stats (which I do daily), you see that my best year was 2014, with 22,000 unique hits and 16,000 unique visitors. My worst year was 2017, when I got 562 total views and 362 unique visitors.

Part of that was due to the brand change. I basically gutted my audience. The other part of that was the 46 posts I wrote during that whole year. 46. The lowest of any year. Even in 2011, which represents numbers for December alone, I wrote 68 posts (and got 1,000 views).

Burnout. I got tired of coming up with new ways to repackage more interesting work by other blogs. I got tired of making the same arguments to no discernible effect. I got tired of shouting myself hoarse in a land of megaphones.

The last election helped. Never had I been less interesting in speaking about the political landscape than I had been in 2016. I still follow the same blogs, but I’m way less engaged with the whole thing. 2016 indicated that many of the things I’d believed about politics – chiefly, that I understood it well enough to adequately predict what would happen – were in need of reassessment. So I decided that I needed to put my energy into original work, into my own writing, rather than scrambling about the internet looking for things to snark about.

Result? Blog crash. I had moved away from the old blog, but not committed to the new. I was producing – three novellas in a year is nothing to sneeze at – but not blogging.

I have fixed that.

So far in 2018, I have 355 views and 236 visitors. Which is still way off my peak. But I have 60 posts in. Since last month, I’ve been blogging almost every day. And I’ve felt the momentum start to shift back. And I’m writing about what I care about, so it feels good. I’m on pace to beat last year, possibly by double. And It’ll be all me, not repostings of other people’s work. It will be – finally – my own platform.

So watch this space. It’s not going away.