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Observations on Blogging

3/27/2020

1 Comment

 
I started this blog in January 2017, and it's now March 2020.  I blogged steadily for much of that time, putting out two posts a week for years.  More recently, I stopped posting, and now begin again.  Here are some of my thoughts and observations about the process! 

  • I like blogging.  I enjoy writing, teaching, sharing thoughts, and synthesizing information. 
Picture
  • I enjoy having a record of my past work and a place for my research. 
  • Though I pay a lot of attention to my output, I pay very little attention to my blog's analytics.  It doesn't matter to me how many people read this, or how the trends change over time.  My friends and family look at it, and they are the ones who matter to me. 
  • It's always fun to get a comment! 
  • Despite generally ignoring my analytics, I do look at them occasionally.  My most popular blog posts, for years, have consistently been Hemming with Horsehair Braid and the Ahsoka Tano Costume diary.  The first one makes sense because it's a tutorial, but the second confuses me: my Ahsoka Tano costume was a one-off.  Maybe my SEO for those posts was amazingly good. 
  • Someone spams my posts with ads for kilts.  I... don't know why.  I just delete them. 
  • My Portfolio has gotten too big.  Part of the problem is that I don't have a clear vision for that section of the site: should it show everything I've ever done?  Only my favorites?  Should it be a nice gallery or a navigable pictorial Table of Contents?  How should I organize it?
  • Choosing tags makes me realize library science is hard.  The "Project Diary" tag seems too broad, since most posts are project diaries of some sort.  I think I need to re-categorize.  Same goes for the Tutorial section of the site... what's the difference between a tutorial and me simply showing you what I'm doing? 
1 Comment
The Sister
3/28/2020 10:41:03 am

I can provide a tip on the Portfolio query, since I deal with that on my own site.

If your goal is to show off what you can do, keep your portfolio page small with only the best & current work, and best-quality photos included - like your pink "Phantom of the Opera" gown (great work AND photographs). People will get a good taste of your levels of skill and creativity without being inundated by sub-par work and dark pictures.

If the object is to show all you've ever done, your page will be cumbersome and people will scroll through quickly, thus missing most of what you're sharing. They'll also find a lot of not-so-good, old work mixed in with the new stuff. If you don't want to lose the old pictures of your work, 'cause it's fun to compare and see how you've grown, have a "legacy" or "archive" link to that cumbersome gallery that people can visit if they're curious.

When I visit an artist's site and see 100 pictures, I get overwhelmed and don't fully appreciate any of them. But if I see their top 15, I get inspired and impressed, and I leave thinking that I'll visit their site again, just to be inspired and impressed again. (And I do!) I need to pare down my own site for just this reason.

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    Karen Roy

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