sei wrote:IMO, blogging is a means too. I am just not sure what your actual end is, even though you wrote it and I'm quoting it.
Doing it because I enjoy writing things, mainly; I see it as an end in itself. If people like stuff I write (and occasionally they do), that's a bonus.
I won't rule out monetization (if I can keep up the regular posting I could see signing up for something like Patreon, though Patreon itself doesn't exactly seem like the ideal option right now, and aside from that I DO intend to expand my Tempin' Ain't Easy post into an ebook at some point in the coming months), but really I do it because I like to talk about this stuff. Same reason I write stuff here.
The reason I haven't done this yet is that it would break every permalink on my site. I know it would be a simple rewrite rule in .htaccess if I were running on Apache, but I don't know how to do it on an IIS server with a Plesk frontend.
If anybody can point me in the right direction, that'd be swell. (EDIT: Done; see below.)
sei wrote:Use featured images. Header images break shit up and make it look sexier.
More time spent finding/capturing/editing/uploading images is less time spent doing what I actually enjoy doing. I just posted the first part of my Mega Man piece and my main takeaway is that it took two things I enjoy doing (playing video games and talking about video games) and turned them into work. More specifically, work that I don't get paid for. Now, there are probably ways to streamline the process and make it less onerous (and I'm going to solicit some ideas in my postmortem after I'm done with the thing), but at the moment "add more images" sounds like exactly the sort of thing that would grate my nuts until I stopped blogging again.
I blog because it's fun. I've demonstrated numerous times over the past 20 years that when it quits being fun, I have a tendency to quit doing it.
sei wrote:Consider just showing excerpts instead of the full posts on the archive pages. It makes it a lot faster to skim for something of actual interest.
The reason I've never used excerpts is because I
hate having to open a link from my RSS reader just to finish reading the article I've already opened. As far as I know, Wordpress doesn't have any built-in way to show full posts in an RSS feed but only show excerpts on the archive page. I could conceivably hack one together (just show the first paragraph of each post, say), but I'm not sure how well that would work in practice.
sei wrote:Audio book section. Do you want to actually sell these?
Yes. But at present I only have three of them, and my asthma is preventing me from recording any more. Trying to get a marketing machine rolling at this stage in the game is putting the cart before the horse.
sei wrote:When you've got the page looking up to snuff, start linking people to it and giving them a promo code for a free download and/or attaching the book for free. You have to get some initial interest/reviews. Figure out where people write about audible books or books similar to the ones you narrated, and send them your shit for an honest review and/or a way they can give their readers some kind of discount. Bonus offering for them (content, if they like your book, and a giveaway to readers); bonus offering for you (traffic); win-win.
I don't own the rights to the audiobooks, Sei; I narrated them as work-for-hire. I don't get to do stuff like give them away to people for free; that's copyright infringement.
I could certainly discuss marketing ideas with the authors (or their representatives; I've never actually talked to Dean Wesley Smith), but again, rolling out a marketing strategy for three books, with no new product in sight for the past year and a half, doesn't seem like it would carry the best ROI.
sei wrote:Make a fucking portfolio page to serve employers / peers. Feature interesting personal projects and any previous web shit done for work that you'd like to show off.
I have one. You've seen it.
We've discussed it. The thread titled "
thadde.us - my portfolio" is literally two spots down from this thread at the time of this writing.
I don't keep my portfolio on my blog site because I would like to direct prospective employers
away from my profanity-filled personal blog, not
towards it.
Now, I've considered putting a link to the portfolio site in my navigation. That would be one of those things I mentioned about not wanting to bring the navigation and site title together at a combined width of 1280px, because I might want to add more things to the nav.
sei wrote:FIX YOUR FUCKING URLs
(and promptly 301 the old ones)
No, that's bullshit; I am not going to intentionally break 933 permalinks. A rewrite rule would be a good solution (and again, I'm open to suggestions on how to do that in an IIS/Plesk environment); an error message is not.
I still get pretty frequent hits from links to my Kirby, Penders, and Final Fantasy posts. I do not want those people to just get a 301 page and leave.EDIT: I guess a 301
is an automatic redirect and not just an error page? Didn't know that; my bad. Still looking into it but it looks like maybe the
Redirection WP plugin might do the job.
EDIT 2: Okay, should be fixed now. Let me know if you see any breakages.
See? I
do have content in your wheelhouse! Thanks for reading and providing feedback.
sei wrote:and would like to point your attention to
Jekyll and company. You run a local script to regenerate the nav, header, siderbars, etc.. It's nice when you want to throw it in a public folder and not have to worry about interacting with the rest of a site's architecture, if your hosting sucks, or you need things to be blazing fast (since it's just serving static files).
EDIT: By no means a "yo, you should switch" sort of thing as much as "hey, if you run into a context where this proves useful, know that it's an option."
Oh yeah, I heard of that thing but I'd forgotten about it. I'll give it a bookmark.