Blogging on Blogging

Blogging about blogging is rather popular, both by established and new bloggers. The media form is constantly evolving and there are always new twists, tools, and techniques. Lately I’m seeing a lot of integration of logins and comments. This is probably for the best as I have enough password/login combos to remember.

On Friday we decided to publish something I’d written on Entrepreneurship and Sustainability. This was supposed to be published in January but things seem to have changed. Our new Greening the Inner-city blog needed content so I threw up “Going for the Green: Targeting Socially Conscious Consumers“. It was lucky I had a spare 4000 word article we could use, I’ll have to add it to my writing samples. It is in a bit different voice and on a topic that I didn’t completely choose. Check it out.

After I pressed publish, I noticed WordPress.com chose some related posts. I’d seen this before on many blogs, but this was the second post on Greening the Inner-city, so I knew we didn’t write these. It appears WordPress.com uses the content, tags, and categories to determine these related posts. I’m not sure how much this will increase your traffic or readership, but I guess it is an advantage to using WordPress.com over self hosting.

I’ve written before about MyBlogLog, I think one of the founders and one of the VCs investing either commented or wrote me about my posting(s). I think I had to make a correction or add an explanation. As I wondered if just by using their tool and clicking an innocent looking link, you could have your face appear on a blog and next to content you didn’t want it to appear beside.

Brad Feld and Raincoaster may have to learn to click the little ‘X’ to make their face disappear after both recently followed a trackback or pingback from Muskblog. I don’t think I have half as many readers as either of them, Muskblog lacks focus and quality control sometimes.

I still have hundreds of posts to re-tag at some point, but it is clear on WordPress.com they matter. I’m curious to see what my tag cloud will look like when I finally turn it on.

Re-Tagging your Blog

MyBlogLog seems to have died out, I’m not sure if they had a successful exit, the Greening the Inner-City blog decided not to renew their domain breaking a lot of links. I continue to re-tag old posts in an effort to achieve an optimal taxonomy and create an appealing tag cloud.

Quality Control for your Blog

When you’ve written and published over 1000 blog posts you have some duds. When your blog has been online for over a decade you have some out of date and no longer relevant content. When you’ve blogged impulsively you have some off topic and off brand content. When you’ve had to go through a lot of difficulties and struggles you have some gripes and less positive posts. Some things need to be preserved for posterity perhaps but isn’t that the purpose of the Wayback Machine?

So in 2019, I was once again unemployed and did long put off blog maintenance including editing harshly many old posts. I deleted many posts. I retitled posts. I re-wrote introductions. I added post-scripts. I adjusted tags. I followed the advice of Yoast to try and improve my SEO. I’ve put so much effort into this blog and gotten so little ROI.

I’ve made a lot of sacrifices for a lot of people and I have not forgotten the names and faces of people who have turned their back on me. This blog used to be a lot more popular. People like Brad Feld used to read it admittedly because I left a trackback or a pingback. Now those techniques are considered spam or no longer important. What is still important is Quality so I continue to improve ten year old blog posts even if no one reads them.

If you have thoughts on blogging or more important blogging well you can leave them below.

This entry was originaly posted on April 26th, 2009, it was last edited on March 20th, 2019 and is filed under: Technology and tagged: Blogging, MyBlogLog, Taxonomy, WordPress.