Editorial – Coming Back to Life

Wow, it’s been 4 months since my last entry. I’ve really been remiss in my updates of this blog. I guess you could say it’s taken an end of summer and autumn hibernation. It’s not that I didn’t have what to say… I had a lot to say. But once you stop updating, it’s sort of what I experience with certain fora (plural of forum) or topics; they remember where is the first unread post, so if you see they have 15 unread posts, you wait till you have time to read them all. And then it’s 150 unread posts and you know you’ll never get to it.

Zombie Jesus lives too! Well… sort of?

Grrrrr. WordPress just ate a couple of paragraphs I wrote…
Anyway, there are two ways to get back to posting: Go with “I’ll post whenever I feel like it”, so you’d make a post without feeling an obligation to keep on posting, which I dislike (and also, once I resume posting, it’s not an obligation as much as a snowball; can’t stop!). The other method is to bite the bullet. Stop procrastinating, and just resume blogging. Delve head-first.

There’ll be a blog post coming once a week, gauranteed. Even if the skies fall or Cthulhu and the lost city of R’lyeh resurface. I will try, and I think in most weeks will succeed, to get two posts up. I’ll be aiming for Sunday-Tuesday for one and Thursday-Saturday for the other. Some weeks may have three posts, but I’m not promising. I’m too wise for that.

NaNoWriMo and Reader Questions.

We’ll begin with my NaNoNoWriMo 2009 thoughts, and move on to my questions to those of you loyal readers of my blog.

NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month, where one attempts to write 50,000 words during the month of November, with the emphasis being put on quantity over quality, trying to get people to write. I am not going to write a novel, and if we are honest, it’s been several years since when “National” had truly been the focus of anything.

And so, I present to you NaNoNoWriMo, which stands for National Non-Novel Writing Month. In the end, NaNoWriMo is all about setting a goal to yourself anyway, so I’m thinking I’ll be writing posts and ideas, and attempt to get to the 50k words mark (not all posts and thoughts would get posted immediately, but at the normal blog(s) spacing, and perhaps some will not get published at all). The posts will include philosophical musings I would like to elaborate on, perhaps a short piece of fiction or two, and posts. Posts for this very blog, or for my personal blog (say, about morality and politics), posts about Role-playing theory, and so on and so forth. Another option is to write about 40k words, and spend time editing and revising some of the texts of one or more of my RPG projects.
I might collect them all in one big PDF at the end of the month and share it.

Now, some questions to those of you who read my blog, or blogs:

1. What would you like to see my write more about?
2. What would you like me to write less about?
3. Why do you read my blog?
4. Does my blog give you something you don’t get from other blogs/sites, if so, what is it? Feel free to list more than one.
5. I began my “Things I Like” non-reviews as quite short (see the Tenjho Tenge, Gurren Lagann and Damages posts), and moved to considerably longer posts, which range upwards of 1,400 words (such as RahXephon, Mai-HiME, and 07-Ghost posts). How do you feel about that?
6. Continuing the above, I tend to pick one thing in the Things I Like posts and focus on it, should I just keep that one thing, which is what I did in the shorter posts, or do that and also add other interesting bits?
7. How do you like my “Non-review reviews”, where I give thoughts on things, and elaborate on interesting things, but you can’t tell from my posts what the series/book is about?
8. Anything you want to tell me, or talk about?
9. I am nearing 10k views on the blog. Does anyone want to do some piece of art (photoshop, doodle, haiku..) for the event? :)

Blog Success. Part 2; Getting Them to Come

This is the second part on how to get your blog a certain amount of success. This entry deals mostly with what to do once you have a blog with some content. Here‘s the first part, dealing with getting your blog up and running.

Letting People Know:

Once you “build it”, it’s not enough. After all, if people don’t know about how hot the content in your blog is, they won’t come and read it, would they?

Be advised, because this takes time, and because of how people work, new visitors are not going to visit most of your older blog posts. This means that if you have truly mind-blowing posts you want a lot of feedback on, you might want to save them for later. This is not to say that the early posts should be throw-away, because if they are, people won’t come and read your future posts, defeating the purpose.

Blog Success. Part 1; Building.

This post will help you achieve more success with your blog: More hits, more comments, hopefully. This post will describe what it takes to get about 2,500 hits a month. Follow less of the steps and/or make less posts, you’ll get less hits. Follow more of the steps and/or be more active about both the steps and making more posts, and you could hit several hundred hits a day.

This post had been split into two parts, because it turned out to be very massive, and quite comprehensive. The next part will appear in about 13 hours, and will deal with how to get your blog the attention, once it’s there.

I’ll begin with the age-old adage, “If you will build it, they will come.” That’s almost correct, I’d append it to say, “If you keep on building it, and keep telling people that you are building it, they will probably come.”

I want to make one last thing clear: I don’t do things just to get more hits. Almost everything I do is how I do normal blogging, I just tweak it slightly to increase the amount of hits I receive. My advice will help you get more hits, but hopefully you won’t do these things just for the hits.

The Basics: Posting.

This is the most basic thing, and a blog that does not have posts, and new posts, is not a blog worth following. In other words, you need to write blog posts; I know it sounds elementary, but it should be hammered in, time and time again. The more blog posts that you will write, the more that people will come, but more important than number is the regularity and spacing.

Geekorner Blog Month in Review: August (And Tail of July)

This may or may not be a permanent feature. But since many of the people currently reading this blog did not read this blog when it was new, it’ll be here this time.
And don’t worry, we’re going to resume normal postings tomorrow or the day after.

August in review (and yes, details are lacking, since WordPress only shows me top 40 clicks/referers, and only “past 30 days” and such, can’t tell it to look at August as a month…):

Hits: 1,955 hits in August, the first full month of posts.
129 hits in July.
Note, at the beginning of August/end of July, I had 30 hits on the “hot” days, 10 on the rest, and a couple with 1-2, from August 6th or so, I’ve had a minimum of 30 hits per day, and from August 13th, almost all days had over 50 hits per day. I aimed at 500-600 hits total, for the month.

Comments: 154 comments in August (including my own).
6 comments in July.

Notable Referers: Note, if your site linked through numerous sites, I can’t see it, can only see the top 40 individual pages who referred. Also, counts some early September data.
Wordpress news (I made the fifth comment, mostly “bounces”, one time-visitors): 300.
Animenano: 166.
Gunstray: 28.
Taikutsu Remedy (Snark’s site): 28.
(It’s not random that Gunstray and Taikutsu Remedy lead to so many hits here, it’s in their site’s setup.)

Notable posts (doesn’t include posts people read off the blog’s main page):
Figure Friday (1): 151 hits.
[TIL]: Element Hunters: 122 hits.
My Room, July 2009: 116 hits.

One more QUESTION before we continue; would you guys be interested in hearing how one can gain a nice level of activity on one’s blog without too much effort (1.5-2k hits a month)? Or do you think you’re all there and it’s superflous?

And now, after the “read more” tag, a description of all the last couple of months’ entries. Please check to see if there are entries you’ve missed which you would’ve enjoyed reading. Thank you.