I need to set up Akismet on mine. I’ve gotten about 35 comments. 30 were obviously spam, one was an actual comment, and the others may or may not be spam and thus I haven’t approved them. I’m not sure how to get more legitimate comments, but I’ve only got 15 posts so I suppose it’s moot at the moment.
I didn’t post a link last time because I was feeling inadequate. I’ve put up two good posts this week so I feel better. It’s at www.CuriouslyLydean.net
Thanks! Yeah…I am really more of a reluctant writer by necessity…
Hahahahaha! Wait until I get around to posting some maggot photos…
I have three - a Livejournal for day to day minutiae, a tumblr for sporadic random things that amuse me, and a Blogger blog for nerd stuff.
The spam filter on wordpress.com (Akismet) has been doing a great job for me. So far I have received 43 legit comments and 14 spam. Only one spam message got through the filter, and it probably wasn’t spam as much as a poorly thought out comment.
Publish links to your posts on your Facebook account (assuming you have one) and hope that one or two of them go viral. Then keep posting regularly to keep the traffic you got from the viral posts.
(That last part is the problem I have. Back in the day when I posted almost daily, I had quite a few blog followers. These days it’s mostly just my Facebook friends.)
Yeah, I’ve been doing that, and crossposting to my livejournal and dreamwidth journal. I know a couple of people have read stuff, but no one comments. I suppose if I keep up the posting rate I’ve done this week it would help.
It really helps if you read, follow and comment on other WordPress blogs. I have 188 posts and about 400 comments from others. Not the best, but it works for now. Some posts get no comments, some get 4, 5 or 6 total.
I don’t get a whole lot of comments on mine either. I’ve tried not to let it bug me. I find that people will comment on Facebook instead of on the blog itself.
I concur with Shadez. If you post comments on other blogs, they have a tendency to comment on yours. I have 20 posts up and have received 45 comments so far. I make a point of commenting on the blog of any blogger that “likes” my site. Seems to be working…
I had a blog and I enjoyed posting to it, but then I got busy and ignored it for a while and now I can’t figure out how to log back in. If I could I would just log back in and rename it I am a dork.
Hahahahahaha! Good thing I wasn’t drinking when I read that!!!
I hadn’t updated the look of my blog since I established it in 2008, but yesterday I got to noodling around with it, trying out some new templates. I’d been wanting to add a link-list of some of my better posts in the sidebar, and with the new setup I found a way to do it.
It took a few hours of trying this, resetting that, compiling stuff, previewing and tweaking, but at last I wound up with something to be reasonably happy with. I prefer a simple look, no eye-dazzling backgrounds, aggressive fonts, and so forth, and the template chosen gave me what I had in mind. There are a couple of other things I might do with it, but for now…
Ta-DAAAA!
It looks great! Nice work!
There comes a point in life when you move away from your circle of university buddies, and enter The Real World; it’s jarring how little The Real World resembles Wired magazine. You start to realise that you’re vastly outnumbered by them. People who have never gigged with a laptop. People who don’t go to Starbucks because it’s too dear. People who don’t listen to music. Talk to them about dirty projectors and they think you’re talking about, you know, dirty projectors. At the local cinema.
It’s a band, see. No, I hadn’t heard of them either. They’re American. There’s a stereotype of the modern woman circa 2007 who had a blog about parenting or moving home that they successfully translated into a book deal, and millions upon millions of people who had blogs that went nowhere. I surmise that if you took all of those people and spaced them evenly across the globe the population density would be very faint. A network of teeny-tiny glow-worms beaming their light straight up into the endless blackness of space. Never illuminating each other. So faint you’d have to look askance to see them. I always think of that photograph of the python that burst whilst trying to eat an alligator. It killed the alligator and then burst and died. Imagine it swallowing the alligator, and then - rip - it splits open.
I have a blog, here, although it had an awkward gestation. I’ve been on the internet since 1995 at least - back when Gary Numan wasn’t trendy, and everything was Usenet, mailing lists and, er, scans of those sexy robots by Hajime Sorayama - and in that time I’ve had a couple of radical career changes, working as an actual bone fide professional writer for a few years. Over time I’ve had (a) a website (b) a blog (c) a wiki (d) and finally another blog, which is about photography. I decided to pick one topic and stick with it. You know, I can remember when Doom had a swastika in it. Just one topic. Need to work out which one. Photography as a whole is too broad; modern photographic equipment is too small, too trivial. I’ve got a huge brush, baby, I want to wave it about. There are loads of photographers who are really just photographic equipment enthusiasts. Golgafrincham B Ark people. Debating which pigment to use whilst Ugg was pondering the inevitability of physical decay and death.
But I’m driven by conflicting impulses. I don’t want to follow the example of those technology review sites where they review boxes. Except that they don’t really review anything, they describe photographs of boxes… they republish advertising images of boxes in order to fill up their quota of daily posts. If you want to be a successful blogger you have to be an absolutely relentless sociopath, the kind of person who views all personal interactions as a means of publicising his or her blog. And the world of photo-blogs is packed with awful Thomas Kinkade-type characters who pump out the same mediocre rubbish with conviction; but no doubt the same is true of dentistry blogs, real estate blogs, etc blogs. I don’t want to be an awful man. And I have my brush.
And there’s the Britain thing. On a practical level I’m in the wrong time zone. Everything that happened on the internet happened fifteen hours ago. The British internet scene has always been a bit pants; insular in a self-conscious way, built on an ingrained and surprisingly persistent foundation of affected effortlessness, affected disinterest. I can’t fit in with that. And yet American writing comes across as sentimental, literal, unimaginative, fundamentally humourless. But that’s probably because my only experience of American writing comes from… actual Americans probably aren’t like that. And the rest of the world, they don’t speak English, so what use are words?
Looks like this thread is losing steam…thanks to all for contributing, it has been really interesting. Clearly dopers are more savvy about blogs than the folks I usually hang around with…
A huge improvement over your old blog in terms of organization. Congrats!
Thank you! It took a fair amount of time and work (plus some annoying false starts) to get what I wanted; glad to hear that the effort was worth it. I don’t ever expect to have a wide readership but I’d like to make the visit enjoyable for whatever scattered readers do stumble upon it.
I had a blog a few years ago but it became too much work. It was a relationship humor blog and got popular really fast. After that, it became an obligation to post and I am not great at being creative on demand. After three years, I bid adieu and let it go. I don’t miss it.
