Webomatica Evaluation: This Year’s Mistakes

December 10th, 2006

Keeping with the theme of new year’s resolutions and humble evaluations of my past year’s screw-ups, I thought I would revisit some of my failings during my first year of blogging, and post in a more general way of some things I could have done better in retrospect and am working to improve on for the future. Hopefully by sharing some of my blogging errors some other aspiring bloggers can avoid similar pain.

1. I didn’t have a clear focus when I started blogging. I admittedly just decided to start throwing stuff up here, and so the blog was definitely more personal in tone – just about what I did during the day or how my commute was. Over several months it became clearer that I’d better off just picking a few topics to cover. I still might be spread to thin, but I’ve settled on a handful of subjects I’m interested in, so it’s not too hard to come up with something to write about on a daily basis.

2. I assumed it would be relatively easy. I’m still a bit perturbed at the amount of time managing a blog (and a bottle cap website) can be. I’ve been consistently surprised at the number of emails and comments I have to answer. Bottle Cap-O-Rama alone has had instances where I’ve been woefully behind with scanning and data entry work from donations that has taken up a whole day. However, I’m still enjoying it immensely. Meanwhile, the blog takes a consistent amount of writing and thought just to keep the momentum going. I just forewarn people that what starts out as a fun side project has a strange way of taking up more and more time – be prepared for more work than you may initially desire.

3. I wasn’t prepared for high traffic. While in retrospect it was a fun ride and totally worth it, I could have taken better advantage of my “digg experience” better if my site hadn’t gone down. I’d advise bloggers to not be under the assumption that nobody reads your blog and therefore you can get around to technical things like image size and caching “later.” Check out my post on WordPress plug-ins to get prepared. You never know when someone might post something you’ve written to digg, reddit, or some other social website until it’s too late.

4. Not enough shameless promotion in the real world. I think one thing that’s continuously surprised me is a relatively limited amount of public ridicule. I’ve gotten a few pissed off online comments but nothing horrible. In the “real world” I’m a relatively quiet and humble guy, and consider the hobby of bottle cap collecting and blogging to be rather ridiculous in the larger scheme of things – so I usually don’t offer up either website readily. However, in the past year, I’ve found that when I tell people about my blog or bottle cap website, people are initially positive, then curious, and some actually start donating bottle caps on their own volition. Similarly with the blog, I’m starting to get more “real world” cross over and some people have even been offering up suggestions of things I should write about. I could get philosophical about personalities that are observers and doers, but I’ll just say you may be surprised at how many quiet supporters there are out there. I guess the nay-sayers are just more vocal.

5. Factual errors. These bug me to no end. There have been a few cases where I’ve published a post only to realize that I spelled a television character’s name wrong or gotten a crucial plot point incorrect. It’s hard sometimes to balance the timeliness of a post vs. accuracy. I’ve started delaying many of my reviews by a full day to check things over and really make sure that what I’m saying reads the way it should. This may be a stylistic thing, but since I’m not really doing breaking news I feel I should strive for accuracy.

6. Style pre-planning. I think if I were to “start over” (or maybe launch a new blog) I’d do more planning ahead, namely, come up with a style guide and a format to follow for blog posts. Things are slowly settling down to a standard here, but I’m having to “back-fill” a lot of information in the name of consistency. For example, I have some stars for ratings that I need to add to my movie review posts, and I started adding director and actor information as well. Little things like that, that I only decided on recently, and the time involved in going back through all my older posts is more than a bit annoying.

7. It comes back to content. I think after the technical hurdles are figured out, the blogging situation is surprising non-technological. It just comes back to the decidedly “old media” situation of coming up with interesting stuff to write about, writing, and dedication. I’m seeing the task as a challenge, with the ultimate goal being to be a better writer and one with some integrity and honesty – none of which have anything to do with traffic or advertising. I’m hoping if I focus on content, the rest will follow, and so far I’ve been pleasantly surprised.

Anyhow, that’s all I’m able to offer up today. But as I mentioned at the start of this post, hopefully anybody else looking to take the blogging plunge can benefit from my hindsight. Overall, it’s fun, and I encourage anybody who’s thinking about blogging to just go for it!

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