Thursday, August 6, 2015

Every Day I Write The Blog: Blaugust

Oh, Elvis. If only you knew. I'm so sorry.

Anyway...

Here we are almost at the end of the first week of Blaugust and the strain is already beginning to show. Not on the bloggers. On the readers.

I'm not entirely sure how many people are officially participating this year. The Anook page lists 129 "followers" aka "users" but I'm far from fluent in Anook. I can't even say "two beers please" and I can do that much in about ten languages.

However many it is it's a lot. More than I can keep up with for sure. I did briefly toy with the idea of adding all the new Blaugust blogs to my Feedly or even my blog roll but even at the start of the month there were over eighty of them and adding all those would almost double the number of active blogs I follow and make my blog roll descend into the second circle of Heck.

Following blogs is no negligible commitment when it comes to time. Well, alright, following them might be - a click here, a cut-and-paste there - but reading them, now that takes a big chunk out of the working day.

Or, in my case, the non-working day, which is, I think, where the problem lies. Toldain, who doesn't seem to have updated his blog for a year and a half, more's the pity, used to go by the by-line "Because reading me sure beats working!" If only!

Yes, if only I could sit at work and read blogs and get paid for it. Well, not for reading them as such, more for being there and reading them while I was supposed to be doing something else. Unfortunately, although I did very much more than my fair share of that kind of thing in the 90s and noughties, it's been a decade and more since I had the benefit of such a cushy desk job.

No, if I want to read blogs I have to do it in my own time. Ditto comment on them. Double ditto write them. With Blaugust in full flood I'm already struggling to keep up with the increased flow from participating blogs I'm following. I'm skim-reading posts I'd normally pore over at length and skipping ones entirely that, in another month, I'd at least be speed-reading. As for thoughtful, pointed or pertinent comments, you can forget that idea right now.

I've also noticed a strange effect on my daily page views. As the week's gone on they've dropped, significantly, which is doubly odd since I've been shadowing Blaugust and posting more than I normally would. At the current rate of decline if I manage to post on all 31 days I should be out of readers by September although I guess I can always rely on my mysterious Russian visitors to keep the lights on.





15 comments:

  1. Clearly you aren't hitting the right topics. The flavor of the week is WoW, with subscription numbers and the expansion announcement. I am significantly up this week on page views due to my pandering directly to that.

    I'll fix that tomorrow.

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    1. Good point! I bet if I worked the comment I just left on your blog about WoW2 up into a post I'd get some page view action. Hmm....

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  2. Thus far, my numbers are more or less same day-to-day... which would be great, if I were not spending an extra 8-10 hours writing/researching posts each week for basically zero "gain." Being fine updating only 2-3 times a week is definitely one aspect of this Blaugust experiment I'm ready to declare solved.

    I *do* feel sorry for those that added all the participants to their blog rolls. I guess that's kinda sorta maybe what you're supposed to do with these things, but 80 * 31 * 10 sentences minimum is a lot of words.

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    1. I agree entirely. I'm kind of curious to see if I can post every day for a month but I'm already convinced I don't want to. I generally average around half that and I think that's my natural pace.

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  3. I am enjoying the challenging of posting and reading it all!

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  4. I am enjoying the challenging of posting and reading it all!

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  5. I'm sure at least 5 of those daily declining pageviews are my (lack of) contribution, since I usually and habitually refresh your page to see if anyone's posted an update - What, log into Feedly? Too much work.

    Since Blaugust started, I've been content just hitting links off the daily forum post and calling it a day, because as you say, the content flood is more than sufficient.

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    1. That's pretty much what I thought was happening. I know I'm not scratching around for stuff to read this month like I was in July.

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  6. Well according to feedly, you have 219 readers there :) I don't know if it is counted as an actual page view. I read everything there.

    You have more energy than me, keep up the good work, I'm reading still! :-)

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    1. Ever since g-reader died, I have no idea how accurate these stats are anymore. Feedly shows me a fraction of the subbers I had when I still blogged on blogger, then they killed that service and I moved to WP. now it's all over the place and everyone uses different readers - or is there any reliable source for all?

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    2. The only use I can see for the feedly "readers" stat is as a comparison with other blogs/sites. It seems possibly meaningful as a kind of "these blogs are roughly in the same ballpark audience-wise" but other than that I have no idea what it means. For most of 2015 I've been averaging 650-750 page views a day but almost to the day that Blaugust started that dropped to under 500 and it's still falling. I'm curious to see what happens in September!

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    3. In my "good times", I averaged 500-800 views a day, sometimes a tad more but overall around 10k per month. Last year I had 140k views total according to statcounter. This has been a steadily increasing number ever since blogger day1. This year I stand at 40k in august....what I said below. :)

      Subberwise all I know is I had 750ish subscribers on the now defunct reader when they shut it down. This would have increased in the years to come if subs follow the same rule as views, but there was no source anymore to track them.

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  7. You will always have readers, at least one is for sure :)
    and you don't get to fret about pageviews....my blog has taken a deep plunge this year from February due to my personal life and writing break. So what. We're still here and whether you write more or less sometime or have more or less time to read&comment, you're a part of this community for me.

    I spent an overwhelming amount of time during my first blogging years with commenting on other blogs and linklove. The side-effects of it were great and are to this day - but it's not something you can maintain forever. I am not a student anymore or only just starting a life and career. Luckily, the wheel of the blogosphere keeps turning and others will step in, so it's all good. I'll gladly sit back with you sometime, enjoy the view and share a cider! ;)

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    1. Hehe! Thanks! I'm not concerned, just curious. Blogging reminds me of the way mechanics work in some MMOs - you can never really quite get at the numbers and everyone has their own theory about what's going on. I like it to be a little mysterious - makes for great speculation.

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  8. I'm definitely noticing the increased "strain" of keeping up with my blogs of choice! They aren't even that large in number, but even a handful of bloggers on your blogroll changing from 1-3 posts a week to one per day is quite noticeable...

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