Tweaking a Live Blog
After 22 days since my first post, I’m still enjoying having my own blog. I was worried that the zeal would wear off quickly and my attention would wander to other projects. There have been moments where I did not feel like writing or doing any research—it is after all work to provide good content. But overall I’m still enjoying myself and have been able to keep my long term goals in mind. And hopefully I’ll improve on providing content that actually is good.
One thing I have struggled with are the little details. Even though I’m happy with the overall product, there have been a few things I’ve wished I had done differently. And once you are live, like any production environment, changes have to be well thought out to minimize risk. Without diving into a rant on change management, I’ll stop at this—even though this blog is in it’s infancy, there are a subscribers. I need to think of them before making changes that may negatively affect them.
Feeds
The item I wanted to change the most was the RSS feeds. I had two—one for the blog posts and one for my weekly links that were located in the sidebar. These links were populated from my Tumblr page using javascript. The set up was fine in the beginning. But then I noticed that most readers were subscribing to the posts feed and the numbers for the links feed were quite low in comparison. I quickly realized that I wanted all readers to get all content for this site.
As other have said of their sites, my blog gives others an idea of who I am. And to me, a reader needs all the content I provide to get an accurate picture.
So as of today I have removed the links in the sidebar and will now post all content in the same manner. I’ve also directed the weekly links feed to the main feed.
Two other items worth mentioning. These both contributed to the decision to make the change:
- I tried finding a way to keep the setup the same but combine the feeds. I looked at yahoo pipes and tried out feedblendr. Neither seemed to meet my needs (and Feedburner does not currently have this functionality). So combining the feeds did not seem like a reliable option.
- We all lead busy lives. Having five kids makes mine even more so. I don’t always have the luxury of free time to write blog posts. There were times when I wanted to post some commentary that would make a really short blog post, but were a bit too long for the sidebar links. I hope this solution will solve that issue.
