John Dilbeck Musings

Darren Rowse has an article about 9 ways to make your blog more inclusive.

Blogging, at its best, is a conversation with topics initiated by the person who owns the blog. Most blogs allow for comments, and this is where the conversation takes place.

However, sometimes, especially for people new to blogging, these conversations seem inaccessible for a variety of reasons. Sometimes the blog is rather technical and uses terms that don’t mean much to a new reader. Other times, the blog has a small group of regulars who are familiar with each other and the comments have private jokes and obscure references or other interactions that exclude anyone who is not a regular part of the conversation.

In 9 ways to make your blog more inclusive, Darren offers some suggestions to make it easier for new people to join the conversations and to understand more about what is being discussed.

Blogging, at its worst, is just one lone person typing away with no responses and can feel like yelling into a fog with no echo.

Some blogs are more technical than others. Some have topics that make conversations easier. Not all blog posts get many, or even any, comments.

I think it is a sign of a healthy blog when there are lively discussions, lots of feedback, different opinions, and a community where people feel free to express their opinions and experiences.

Darren has that kind of community at ProBlogger.net, and I applaud him for helping the rest of us find new ways to make our own blogs more inclusive and open to feedback.

Over the last six months, I’ve been doing a lot of work to learn more about blogging and syndication, using a variety of tools.

One of the things I wanted to do was to create multiple blogs on specific topics. I’m interested in, and do, a lot of different things, and I didn’t want to confuse someone who was reading a story about marketing in one message and then one about nonprofits in another and making customized t-shirts in a third.

How can you build a readership when your blog has no focus?

So, I decided to use the easiest tool I could find: Blogger.

I built about two dozen blogs and learned how to syndicate them on multiple sites using javascript, iframes, and php. Things were going great, and I was getting ready to turn my attention away from building the infrastructure to writing more about the topics to which each blog was devoted.

However, about a month ago, Blogger installed new software, apparently, and I started going through a round of being blocked, then whitelisted, then blocked again, and so forth. Finally a couple of days ago, I had had enough of it and decided to move all my marketing, affiliate marketing, and network marketing blogs off Blogger. But, I didn’t want to lose what I’d written.

So, I registered Blog Feed Syndication and archived over 20 of those blogs there. Since they’ll no longer be powered by Blogger, they are suspended until I find a new way to do what I want without having to do a lot of extra work in the process.

I’m testing WordPress for this, but really don’t know enough about it to make a determination if that’s the way I want to go or not.

Ideally, I’ll find a way to blog in one place, choose separate categories for each posting — as I can do here with Radio Userland — and generate a separate RSS feed for each category that can be syndicated as I want. So, I have some learning to do over the next few days.

I did decide to leave my Cherokee County, NC Blog and Murphy, NC 28906 Blog on Blogger for now. Since they do not have the marketing characteristics of some of my other blogs, perhaps they won’t trip the new algorithms that have caused me so much trouble over the last few weeks.

(Update: September, 2006 - I’ve restarted both those blogs using WordPress and I’ll be reloading the old postings from the archives to the new blogs as I have time.)

In the meantime, I believe I have archived my test postings from my blogs so I can access that information and use it again, if I need to do so.

One lesson I’ve learned, again, is not to trust a free service enough to try to build a business around it, especially when their terms of service tell me my only recourse is to stop using the service if I don’t like what’s happening.

I’m old enough to have learned that lesson decades ago, but I keep making the mistake that I can trust people I don’t know, systems over which I have no control nor influence, and the inevitable gremlins that find new places to live.

Back to the drawing board, one more time.

A few months from now, I’ll probably laugh about this new opportunity to have a learning experience.