Blogging is a tough business !!!
Nov 21, 2010 Blog Stuff
After several weeks of null blog writing it is time for some reflexion about the nature of the blogging business and my very first year of formal blogging activities.
October 2009 was the first month I posted blog entries on this site and one of my first article’s “I have a blog, now what? briefly mentioned some mere speculation about what could it be a good Blog writing frequency and at that time a I had a goal in my mind ; I was about to write at least one article every month. Today is one year and five weeks from that very first article and the only thing I can say for sure is that “Blogging is a hard activity” of course based on my very own experience.
Well, I am not a professional blogger (not looking to make money out of this) and I am doing it mostly for fun and for my own amusement so I think I can always find excuses and pretty good explanations of why I have not been as consistent as I was expecting but I am not going to write about that, instead I think I would write about what I have learned during the process.
I think I have been managing my Blog categories in a pretty conservative matter, this was a question I also had during those very first weeks of blogging and I tried to set some guides to my self when I wrote “What about my blog categories?“. I choose basically three main categories and in some point in time one of them started to split into sub-categories but not going too crazy. For this coming year I will still be focusing on “Blog Stuff“, “Computer Programming” and “Linux stuff” kind of topics. Needless to say that I am feeling pretty inclined towards writing more about computer programming and I can easily see these sub-categories also expanding a little bit but that is still to come.
There is a side of blogging that I am still struggling and trying to find out the fun out of it. Definitely the “Discussion” concept of blogging which is heavily based on accepting and managing “Comments” from readers of our articles is a mysterious and sometimes difficult to understand side of blogging. At one side we all want to receive constructive criticism about what we Blog about and to be honest; most of the time we expect words of positive acceptance about what we are sharing through our article’s writing. In the other side, I believe I am not the only one that have found “Comments SPAM” something difficult to cope with and to be sincere this is definitely not a fun thing to get into but it is something every blogger should have to face. Yes, we can always turn comments off but then our blog would become a mere “CMS” used as one way communication system which is something I was previously doing with my former static web site and something I was trying to move away from. Trying to deal with this phenomena I got myself in a quest to find a good way to minimize “comments spam” coming to my site and decided to give it a try to a technique that would stop the “SPAM Robots” and personally decided to keep up with the “Human SPAM” kind by myself. Wrote an article “SPAMBOTS… come and get me…” about it and put myself in the spot and now I am paying for it. To be short I am using a “WP-SpamFree” plug in and I think it has been pretty effective by blocking about 675 blog comments automatically for me but over the same period of time (~six months), I have been reviewing 725 comments and determined that at least 701 (97%) are SPAM and only 22 (3%) are somewhat legit comments related to topics on my site or to the article themselves. Not necessary to spend much time o how do I determine if a comment is SPAM, basically is pretty obvious and the sad part is to make the mechanical drill of reading and marking them appropriately. My main approach is based on comment relation to the article and the URL links provided that is related to article in question such as what I wrote sometime ago about “Blog’s motion laws“. Basically I do really care what my site is recommending to visitors and legit readers. I will be certainly writing more about this comment’s SPAM war I am fighting so stay tuned.
Well, I think this is good enough by now to break my writing “apnea” and I do really hope I will be honoring my monthly writing commitment for the year to come.
