Bad poll. Where’s the “no and I’m not thinking of starting one because it’s a hideous waste of time” option? And really what’s the diff between a “blog” and facebook? Just someplace where people can blah blah blah ad nauseum.
No thx.
I assume the bottom answer means no and not thinking about it. I have thought about it, but I’m horrible at coming up with something to say unless I have someone to bounce off of. Despite how prolific a poster I am, you’ll note that I very rarely start threads.
I love writing for my blog; when I was a newspaper reporter I loved column-writing. Unfortunately I haven’t had much creative energy lately, but there are a couple years’ with of material up. I am apparently the Internet’s foremost authority on a painting called The Hung Jury and on how to pronounce my last name, because I get a lot of hits on those columns. NouveauSoileau.
I’m just getting back into this now. I always used to have blogs or websites or whatever, but I let it slide for a few years. It can be a hassle keeping these things up. But I feel, at the moment, I need to start putting myself forward a bit more. It’s too easy to settle down in your shell and start eating your own brain.
I have one (named after an SDMB meme, actually) that gets updated periodically, mostly on random topics. I consolidated a bunch of older stuff under wordpress about a year ago but still don’t have everything rehosted.
Special topic “blogs”
The Game Pile
The Mountain Divers (Lost part of this one so it’s really out of date now)
I’ve had a blog for years, and have used it as a sort of life journal. It’s been running for seven years? I think? I post several times a week. Originally it was about work and food and books, and now it’s mostly about kids and food and occasionally books.
I just about fifty hits a day, and I have a handful of followers. For me, it’s been community-forming. Some of the bloggers I read regularly read mine (heaven knows why, since they’re all better writers than I am) and sometimes comment. I tend to hang out in the Catholic homeschooling blogosphere, and it’s all pretty interconnected.
I sometimes think about quitting, but it’s been a nice way to journal my life, and a good way to share photos. Whenever I post about shutting down (because it seems so navel-gazing and clutters the internet 
) I get people telling me not to, which is flattering.
Anyway, I like blogging. I like reading blogs.
You can use your macrocritters.com domain on your WordPress.com blog. It’s pretty easy to do but it’s a paid upgrade.
As for traffic: this is good advice, even if you don’t get featured there. The related article about traffic is useful too. Experiment with tags - a good mix of general and specific tags can help bring in readers.
For a photoblog I’d suggest using larger images, and perhaps a theme that makes the most of them. Uploading the images directly to WordPress.com will make that easier (and there are some neat-o image features coming soon). Try putting your images first. And always include the single word tag “Photography” on your photo posts, so you have a chance of showing up here.
(disclosure: I work for the company that runs wp.com)
It doesn’t have to be like that. I mean, you can be against it all you want, but this is how it works for me: I really, really like keeping a journal. But if I have NO audience I can’t seem to do it. If I have an audience of even just 5-10 people, even if they are not actually reading it, but I have a perception that they might, I find I write often.
Which means I have a pretty good chronicle of my life, big and small, for the last 7 years. Which is a big deal. I no longer go “Um…what year did we do that…I can’t remember.” I just go to my archived journals and pull up what I need.
I love that aspect of it. and I get a little social interaction when people do comment on it.
I’d like to give WordPress a rousing “FUCK YOU!!!” for defining adult/mature content as “bad stuff” and lumping it right in there with the copyright violations, spam and so forth. Fuck you, WordPress. You’re not required to promote mature content, but you could at least have established it as a separate category of stuff you don’t promote. As it is, the way you set it up is quite revealing …
Ha! That’s great! My problem is that I am very goal driven: I really don’t like the process of writing, but really like the final product. It’s a challenge for me as I have to write a lot for my job. I finished a book last fall that I am very proud of, but the writing and production of it made me want to blow my brains out…
You have a great blog by the way (I used to love the Avengers as a kid)…
Its certainly different from mine…I like it!
I have a WordPress blog that I keep regarding my upcoming move to the Netherlands around Christmas time. The original goal was to keep family and friends informed after I moved. My fiancé gave me a redirect domain as a late Christmas present so I started it earlier than I could have imagined I would.
I have been posting daily since early January - so more than 185 posts now. Sometimes it is difficult to do daily posts, sometimes it is easy. (Lately it has been easier since I sacrifice sleep to finish everything I want to finish each night, including studying Dutch grammar. :p) The blog link is http://lifeinthehague.com
On reading Dutch children’s books which have a bit of swearing/similar in them
On watching Dutch TV online
On crazy Euro 2012 Dutch decorations
One of my favorite aspects is following other blogs, both WordPress and other domains like blogspot, and reading about the adventures of some other expats who live in the Netherlands. It feels pretty weird to have the blog almost a full year before I move, but it’s been fun.
Thanks very much for the advice!
I plan to use macrocritters.com for my blog eventually. But I need to stick with the free service until I know for sure I am going to keep posting long-term. My goal is to post 30 times in 30 days to build up content and hopefully a little following, and then reassess. I am running some polls right now to help with that process. So far it seems like I am on the right track.
I would love to get featured on freshly pressed (obviously) and I think my blog meets all the criteria in the article you linked to. I am tinkering with the tags…but so far I’m not getting a lot of hits from searches, but then there is probably a lag time.
As for photos, I am a bit conflicted. I have been advised to keep photos small and easy to load. I also host tem on Flikr rather than wordpress.com so as not to use up my available blog space too soon. Also, the way I tend to tell a story is to first introduce the topic, discuss and illustrate with photos in kind of that order. So the photos tend to be at the end of the post. If I put the photos at the start it would king of like starting a joke with the punch line. Maybe I could compromise with a larger photo at the start, followed by text and smaller photos? I’d really appreciate more suggestions and thoughts about this…
Cheers!
Saw a T-Shirt that put it in perspective:
[FONT=“Impact”]MORE PEOPLE HAVE
READ THIS SHIRT
THAN YOUR BLOG.[/FONT]
I was humbled, yet amused. Actually, it took the pressure (to be brilliant every post) off.
I have two blogs I post to. One started out in 2005 as a paddling blog designed to offer info to other paddlers about rivers and lakes–boat ramps and their conditions, currents, things a paddler might want to know. I started out including a few photos to go with the text. Over the years it became a photo blog that had images (mostly wading birds) taken from the kayak. Lots of positive feedback and other results from that, but I don’t paddle much any more. I changed the title to move it from just paddling into bird photos taken from land and I post now and then.
The other one is a camping blog that is also designed for info purposes and has brought good feedback. Campground info, best sites for tenting or RV (also started in 2005 when I was a tenter, now I have a small RV), site photos, info about the area (restaurants, day trips, etc.). Photos are far more snapshot-y than those in the other blog since they are not the point of the posts. This blog gets updated after every camping trip unless I have posted about that destination in depth before, so during camping season it is active. It’s just sitting there gathering moss right now.
I have a few blogs in Google Reader that I follow, but not many.
Thank you, Latimera! I enjoy it. Thanks for reading.
I love it that so many people are inspired to write informative blogs. Since I’m an expert on nothing, it’s amusing to me that mine has actually turned out to be a tiny bit informative. I also get a lot of hits from people wanting to know about the Walking Dead characters’ boots. 
Your traffic is excellent for a blog that’s only a month old. I checked and you’ve definitely been indexed by Google - but it takes time and patience to build good search traffic.
Here’s my take on wp.com tags: popular single-word tags like Photography and News have the potential to bring in a burst of traffic, so you should use some. But you’re competing with millions of other blogs, so you’ll quickly drop off those pages (posting daily helps of course). More obscure tags won’t bring much traffic in the short term, but your posts can stay there for a long time, which helps in the long term. So use a mix of big tags (Photography, Art) and less common ones.
Yeah that’s what I’d suggest - a line or two first is fine, but have a look at your posts in the Reader. Some of them have so much text first that the image doesn’t show at all. Follow the Photography tag in your reader, and watch what other bloggers do there - see what works and what doesn’t. There are good examples here, also some links to good photoblog themes.
You have 3G of free space. It’s rare for people to need more for photos.
You’re right that you don’t want the page to load too slowly, but if you upload images directly, WordPress.com will resize them on the fly to fit the page. (And it’ll do that correctly in different contexts, like the Reader and on mobile devices). I usually upload a mid-sized, high quality jpeg, (1024px or so wide, a few hundred kb) and they look great. It will be more important soon to have high-res images.
You might also want to take a look at the photo challenges on the Daily Post blog. There’s good general blogging advice there too.
Oh yeah- this is my blog. It’s mostly interesting to me, but I agree with what another poster said (Anaamika?) knowing it’s sort of public keeps me writing. It’s the longest-running journal I’ve ever had.
Thanks for the great advice! Glad to hear that my traffic isn’t bad so far…I really didn’t have anything to compare to. I followed your suggestions with my post last night, using a large version of the final photo at the top of the blog. Response seems good so far…
Cheers!