Post or Perish? It Depends

I'd like to post a few thoughts about the ups and downs of blogging, particularly to the new blogger. And I'm not exactly an old-timer at this subject, but I've posted a few hundred times on about two dozen blogs I've started and stopped, amassed a few thousand visits and some interesting comments from fellow bloggers over a three-year period since I began this one, and remain committed primarily to the power of words to entertain, inform, and stimulate the mind and heart every bit as much as the ubiquitous digital photo or video or sound clip does on so-called "blogs" elsewhere. I'm a word blogger. I like the challenge of trying to create pictures and sounds in the imagination, and I leave the digital pictures and sounds to others. I'm a Greek, not a Roman, and I seek thought, not spectacle.

Blogging, in its simplest form, is so easy that anyone can do it. But that's not to say that anyone can attract growing numbers of visitors. It's a maxim for new bloggers that the best way to attract attention is to post readable, topical entries and post them frequently, tagged with keywords on interesting subjects, then follow up by reading other's blogs and commenting on them when you have something to say and inviting those writers to visit your site at their convenience as well. Make links available to your blog and invite subscribers. Then contact the search engines and wait for their spiders to crawl your entries, usually within a few days or weeks.

But even if you do all these things faithfully and begin to build visitors of a few per day or week, then a few more, chances are that if you do not keep posting, your stats will quickly level out and stagnate until they get "fed" again with a new post or three from you. This is because the engines and watchers that are keeping an eye on you as well as nearly countless other new blogs hitting the internet every day are waiting to see how you do, waiting to see if your blog has the power to pull a visitor with increasing frequency, to draw a subscription link without resorting to buying one, in effect, from many sites who will gladly sell you their admiration and promise to splash your blog title all over Google's masthead as Number One in the Universe--for a fee of course.

And if you don't post for a few days or a few weeks, it tells the watchers that you may be among the unwashed multitudes who just like to set up a site then abandon it in a few days. These "been there, done that" bloggers are the curse of every host, wasting bandwidth and refusing to "improve the land" in any way, till they're finally cleaned out of the hosts' servers at no small bother.

So if you don't want the world to think you're another dilettante blogger just passing through the fickle attention span of cyberspace, post regularly. You don't have to post every day or every hour, but post at least every several days to a week, at least once. This applies especially to new blogs. If you do not, if you want to rest on your initial fit of inspiration that filled up a couple of pages, then sit back and see who visits, be prepared to see goose eggs on your statcounters after the initially curious pass by.

However, if you do post regularly, it will trigger the quicker visits of the search engine spiders, the links you need to build your rank, and within a few months you may reach a few hundered to a few thousand visits from all over the world, and that is very satisfying. Then, having reached a certain "critical mass," you may be surprised and gratified to find that you do not really have to post as often to keep growing, and your visitors will continue to increase without daily need for attention on your part.

I think the biggest problem for new bloggers is the unrealistic expectation that the whole world is waiting with bated breath to hear their immortal thoughts via a new blog, and when they don't see a thousand visits the first day, the next day they quit. It needs to be understood that just because the internet is free and open to all readers, and your blog can be read around the globe the instant you hit "publish," it doesn't mean that everyone on the internet knows or cares that your words are there at "ohgolly.myspot.com," or would rush right over to read you even if they did.

Think of it as if there were a book, a hard copy, published tomorrow bearing your same immortal thoughts, and that one copy were sent, somehow, to every bookstore in the world at the same time. Now, who would happen upon it? And if a few did pick it up, who would read it? And if a few did read it, who would discuss it? Comment on it? To whom? Until someone reviewed your book, discussed your book, assigned your book or created some buzz somewhere about your book, chances are it's not bound for the New York Times Bestseller List, right?

The internet is no different when it comes to the need to market your product. But it's done electronically now, through search engines, keywords, comments, and the same hard scrabble work that print marketing requires. You have to be patient, and you have to pay your dues and build up a few readers who want to follow your ideas as you offer them, then if you're lucky, in time there will be some buzz generated, and voila! one day you get the shock of your life that 48 people read something you posted, all at once, and pretty soon you're hearing from the host of your blog nagging you to consider selling ad space and other corruptions so he can cash in on your emerging authorship fame as well!

That happened to me, once, so I know it can. (Didn't sell the adspace, though; I hate ads on blogs. It's so crass.)

Write to Say It (or to Sing It)

Inner Elves is up and running, my "other voices" blogsite offering about 80 posts so far, although I still have about 35 stories, poems, and miscellaneous items I'll probably post, including some I like the best. I have to do them a few at a time so the servers don't have a hissy fit and make me validate myself with "qzieh" or "foziyuts" in order to publish my own post. Actually, it's a good feature in helping to keep out machine spam.

I want to especially thank Rhononymous for suggesting I indicate when I wrote each piece. I've put the year at the end of each and grouped them above the archives. Good idea, R!

So I've syndicated through all the search engines, who will in time now send their little arachnids to crawl inside my head--they enter through the ear, you know--and index the elves' works. I've chosen a serviceable template for starting up, and configured in some pingers and statkeepers and other feedback widgets, so I am quickly approaching the end of the startup.

Now I just hope somebody reads some of these. In any case, I'm glad I put them out there where anyone who wishes can access them instead of letting them continue languishing unread in computer files and mss on my stack, or stuck away in ringbinders.

Creative writings are meant to be read. Maybe nonfiction thoughts can benefit from being set down in journals and diaries and kept private, or blogged about, if the writer wants to communicate them; but creative writings--stories, poems, sketches and other forms from the imagination--definitely are meant to be read. It's a shame when they are kept hidden, for whatever reason.

So now I have this blog for my rant and the other for my rave. I'm looking forward to writing in each mode, expository and creative, and being able to share on both venues. But I still have my journal, and that's just for talking to myself. Its pages are legion. I'll never stop journaling, above all. It keeps me sane. (?)

One new blog, One refurbished blog, and Two dead blogs

I'm making some big changes in my blogs overall: a new look here, with updated links, and a whole new Blogger blog I'm really excited about: inner elves I call it, and invite everyone to check it out. It's where I've decided to post my more creative fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from most of my manuscripts going back over fifty years but just gathering dust. I decided I never was going to try to market them and they'd just get tossed if I didn't do a vanity collection (which would also gather dust in the copies I would spend a lot to publish and I wouldn't sell anyway). The more I thought about it, putting them out to the world in their own new blog here made a lot of sense. And I'm having a lot of fun putting it together.

Furthermore, it also makes a lot of sense to me that I didn't need two other blogs I've posted to in the past besides this one: nbknotes and nbk2. Those were languishing without new posts for many moons, so I deleted them today. Two blogs will be fine, because I basically have two selves in my writing : my creative side and my expository side, each looking for expression. In the past, I've found they don't mix very well for me in the same venue, so now each has its own.

Good Lord, what have I done! each screams at me. Oh well, too late now. (Besides, I saved all the stuff from the other now-defunct blogs as .xml's and will edit them into the one or the other new ones. There. I think that's going to work just fine.

On the brighter side

I just noticed my recent blogs are pretty intense. Think I got caught up in the war, the shootings, bad student (and other) behavior in the schools, and the horrible things in the news generally and was trying to make sense of them in my mind. But not to be negative, I want to sign on to my blog and see something a little more positive, without being Pollyanna about it.

So here goes. It's a beautiful day, just great. And I just finished classes for the spring semester and have the grades all ready to submit. The students overall did themselves proud on the papers and last test, and for the first semester in a while I was pretty impressed with their efforts. It's good to feel like I made a difference in their lives and learning. I'm teaching summer session and already have nine or ten enrolled, so it will "make," and we'll get a nice start on our vacation budget.

And things seem to be falling into place. Our youngest sons are touring Europe in June, and it looks like Barb will get the foot surgery she needs by early June and be ambulatory by the time we can head out. We've mitigated some of the big doubling of our property insurance by taking higher non-hurricance deductible and getting a very favorable insurance inspection that should bring us closer to a mortgage payment we can live with, and if it doesn't, we've gotten an alternative quote lined up that will.

Everyone is busy and healthy, I already have my classes lined up for fall teaching, and if we can just get some rain to fall down here before we all have to ride camels in the South Florida Desert, we should be in good shape for a rewarding and full summer.

Cynicism's Dark Quicksand

President John F. Kennedy hated cynicism and frequently chided the complainers in his administration. His mother, Rose, had read to him as a child of knights and heroes and brave deeds in the face of adversity. He grew to manhood believing that if one didn't like the way things were, he should try to do something about them rather than just complain. As a public servant he wrote the Pulitzer-winning Profiles in Courage to inspire others to act for change, not to simply accept the slings and arrows life's outrageous fortunes fling at everyone.

And it struck me today as amazing what one individual can do when one takes hold of almost any issue. I admit that much in our lives seems to visit things upon us we'd rather not face, and sometimes it's tempting to feel we really don't have much control over events and outcomes. But it's very rare that something happens that we really can't do anything about at all. When those things do happen, St. Francis of Assissi had the best response in his famous prayer, "Give us the courage to change what we can, and the strength to accept what we cannot."

The psychologist Robert Butler wrote that the human mind is programmed to think toward one goal, and that is to act. "The end of all thought is action," I read from him as an undergraduate, and it rings still in my ear today. Every thought tries to move toward a response, not just an acceptance of a status quo. It is ingrained in the species and is an imperative for survival. The mind of man is not given its intelligence, its reasoning abilities, its many faculties of memory and imagination, insight and intuition simply to mull things over and over and never conclude anything, or to wallow in self-pity, bitterness, or a sense of despair or helplessness. To do so, to harbor and cultivate resentments against others instead of trying to take positive steps to correct perceived wrongs, to the point of delusion and paranoia, is the quiet prelude to tragedy, as happened at Virginia Tech, Columbine, and countless other sad events of our times.

No one should allow himself to feel helpless in the face of life's challenges or victimized by circumstances, because no one can control what will challenge him each day. What we can do, however, is control how we respond to those challenges, and in those choices become not victims of fate but the masters of our own destinies. Someone once said, if you believe you can do something, you may be right; but if you believe you cannot, you are right. So long as you choose to feel that way, you are a victim. But it is your choice whether you accept it and remain so. As JFK said, if you don't like something, try to change it.