I look on my Blog as a number of things:
- A way of communicating to my friends and family how things are in my life.
- A way of communicating to the world stuff I find interesting or meaningful (in good or bad ways).
- An historic document about who I am, right now, and what I believe, and what’s going on. One of these days the hardcopy of these pages (heh) will (I hope) be interesting reading for Katherine, or her kids, or their kids.
To that end, I do a lot of these little daily Q&As. It beats nattering on and on about the Middle East or the RC Church Scandal.
So, Doyce found this rather lengthy one on Blogger Pride:
Ethics/Personal Life
Has a blog post ever got you into trouble? Not per se. I do try to remain conscious of who is (or may be) reading this. Sometimes Margie has gotten annoyed (justifiably) when I’ve blogged important stuff going on in my life before I’ve told her about it.
How many people do you know face-to-face who read your weblog? I would guess 7-10.
Have you met any of your regional (or even remote) bloggers? I’ve not had face time with anyone I “met” through blogging.
Do you modify or delete posts? How often? Why? I have never gone back and deleted a post. I have sometimes started a post, left it, come back to it, and not posted it because I didn’t feel the need to. I lot of what I post I post because it rings an emotional chord in me, and those sorts of things are fleeting. I do modify posts occasionally, but only to add an update or correct a spelling error.
How much is your weblog a part of your personal identity? Do you feel like people who don’t know about your blog don’t really know you? Interesting question. I think it’s an additional channel of information, not essential but important (it damned well better be, for all the time I put into it). Because I know that my friends and some family read it, I do let it relieve me of the need to update them on all the trivia in my world.
I do let people who I want to know about me know about my blog. It’s certainly their prerogative.
How has blogging changed your life?
UPDATE: (Not sure how I missed answering this question when I first posted, but …)
Well, it certainly takes up a lot of time.
It’s helped me keep in better touch with my parents, rather than a weekly phone call (since we all know how I love talking on the phone), as well as some other distant friends.
My blogging is somewhat interactive. I read a lot more news on-line now than I used to, and consider myself better informed about a number of current events.
I have the mixed advantage of having extra conversational bits (from the stuff I read), but often not having anything new to share (with folks who read my blog).
It has, nonetheless, given me a chance to chronicle some things in my life that would otherwise, even after several months, be lost to the vagueries of my gestaltic memory.
Technical/Design
Do you know how to code at all? Did you learn how to code by blogging? I’d done some “raw” HTML work in the past, as well as using FrontPage, so it wasn’t a complete black box to me. I’ve learned quite a bit more by working on my page (including CSS), so I’d rate myself as 4th or 5th level web page coder, from a D&D perspective — competent enough to get myself into trouble.
What weblogging tool do you use and why? Movable Type. I originally started with Blogger, but the number of folks bailing from that platform (due to its reliability issues) makes me glad I changed to something I can host and tweak myself. MT is very easy to maintain, the developers are very supportive, and there’s a growing community to provide assistance and ideas for its use.
MT does the job, and more.
Does the design seem like something that is just something that has to be dispensed with in order to be able to write publicly, or is your design an integral part of your writing and presentation? I like form. But the function of this site is largely divorced from it. This page could be in 14 pt. green Courier text on black, no logos, buttons, graphics, boxes or anything, and I like to think that 90% of the purpose here would be fulfilled. But I don’t think anyone would want to read it, because it would be ugly.
I’m not quite the design monkey that some bloggers are. Part of it is skill set, part of it is laziness, part of it is time. But I like to think that I provide at least some design goodness here, and tweak things frequently enough to keep folks visually interested.
How many times have you changed your weblog design entirely (or nearly so)?
1. Original Blogger “Partridge Family” design.
2. Green, green, green
3. Disneyworld colors.
4. Disneyworld Two
5. Banana Cream
6. Sibyl
7. Venus in Blue
I think that more or less covers it.
Readership/Motivation
How many people would you guess (educated guess based on hit counts/logfiles) read your weblog on a weekly basis at least? According to Extreme Tracking, I get around 800 unique visitors per week. I’m guessing that’s probably 200 people (figuring some folks are weekly, most folks are every few days, some people are more frequent).
What have you done to get more people to look at your site? Who? Moi? Stats Whore? Perish the thought.
Ahem.
I do belong to a number of blog rings, including the inimitable Blog Snob. I do a ping to weblogs.com and to movabletype.org when I update (and I get quite a number of hits from those sites). I include my blog URL in comments. That’s about it.
What one or two characteristics make a blog really popular? Are there things that you could do to have more people read your weblog that you conciously do not do? Why? I think it’s a lot like real life. You can be popular by hanging out and chatting up popular people. Being part of the In crowd. I could do that. But I don’t do it in real life, so I don’t do it in my virtual life, either.
What really popular weblog do you think most deserves it…and/or least deserves it? I don’t hang out at popular weblogs I don’t like, so I really couldn’t say. The ones I think deserve it are listed in the Link List o’ Deservedness to the left. The ones there that are really popular are probably InstaPundit and BoingBoing. (I don’t think any of the “person” blogs I go to are A-list super-popular types. I don’t read folks’ hit logs. And most folks I know don’t talk about their stats — hmmmm, that’s interesting, since it’s something that I post about.)
How do you feel about your readership? What makes for a quality readership to you? The only way I know about my readership is (a) if they post comments (and I have some fine readers, based on that), or (b) if they blog about me or include me in their link lists (ditto). I do get a frisson of pleasure when I see that someone thinks enough of this blog to actually create a link to it.
Influence of Other Bloggers
What other blogger is most responsible for you starting your own weblog. Doyce. It’s all his fault. Blame him.
Who was the first other blogger (that you know of) who put you on thier sidebar, and how did you feel? How did it influence your blogging? Actually, that would have been Doyce, too. He even pointed it out en blog and encouraged folks to visit. Very nice of him. Made me feel like folks could find me, and that what I was doing was worthwhile.
What other blogger do you most admire for her writing skills? James Lileks. He doesn’t write snippy little blog entries. He writes articles. Essays. Great stuff.
What other blogger do you most admire for her design skills? Gotta be Stacy. She does this stuff professionally. Woo-hoo. Lileks does a good job, too, as does Senshineko (now that he’s on MT).
Who is a blogger that you think is really good but doesn’t get nearly the attention they are worthy of? {Blush}
No, but seriously, Doyce deserves many more hits than he gets, especially when he’s able to devote himself to the blog thing more than he’s been able to the past few. Actually, by and large, anyone on the Link List o’ Worthies to the left deserves plenty of hits. That’s why they’re there.
Do you feel obligated to have people on your link lists/sidebars that you never read? That way madness lies. I try not to make it a popularity contest, and there are a number of folks who link to me to whom I do not (have not ever or no longer) link to. That’s because my link list is not actually a recommendation to cool sites, my statement above notwithstanding. It’s a convenient place for me to click to go to the places I read.
Of course, it’s all a matter of taste — there are authors that are generally considered to be most excellent whom I do not read for a wide variety of reasons. One of the signs of maturity, I believe, is recognizing the difference between personal aesthetics and morality, and the same is true for the difference between personal aesthetics and global value. Just because I don’t read something doesn’t mean you shouldn’t, or even that I think you shouldn’t. It means that I don’t think I should (or that I don’t care to), and that’s all.
And part of the equation for me is minutes per day divided by things I have to do. I could easily have some hundreds of sites there. I don’t have time to visit them all, so I have to make some hard decisions.
If I run across a site I like, I put it in a favorites folder. Once every month or so, I revisit all of them. If I still like it (i.e., if I found something I enjoyed reading or found interesting and which makes me want to come back), then I put it in the link list. At the same time, if I’m finding my attention waning on any pages I’m visiting, I lower them in category, or drop them off altogether (though I keep a record of all the sites that have been there).
What one or two characteristics define a really quality blog (in your humble opinion, of course)? (1) Frequency of posting. I tend to visit the blogs on my list at least weekly, and (toward the top of the list) daily. If the content isn’t changing in that interval, my interest in returning will wane. (2) Content. Tell me what you think. Interest me with your words. If you just put links, even if they are to the world’s most interesting places, I won’t be interested in your page. (3) A sense of humor. (4) A decent, readable, functional design. (5) Not answering with five points when only one or two are asked for.