Never Mind Sunday

This not being my first Blaugust, I came in with enough posts already finished to cover the eight or nine days when I'd be working and wouldn't normally publish anything. All the posts are part of a series that should carry on well past the end of the month, quite possibly all the way to October, which is a lot more structured thanI generally get. I was pretty pleased with myself when I came up with it, you can bet.

So far, so smart, except I forgot one crucial thing... which is that all of these posts would appear almost exclusively on weekends, which is when I work and don't usually post anything. As everyone knows, even if not everyone agrees, there's a theory that weekend posts get considerably less attention than those that appear on weekdays. 

The logic behind the theory is people prefer to read blogs in someone else's time, especially when they ought to be working, not in their own time, when they have plenty of better options. It doesn't apply to people like me, who don't have the luxury of sitting at a desk with time to burn, but I know it certainly was what I used to do, back when my work situation was different.

Even so, I'm not a hundred per cent sold on the theory myself. Evidence to support it or disprove it seems very anecdotal. 

A few Blaugusts ago there was something of a discussion about it during one of the Advice weeks. Various bloggers reported differing experiences and I don't recall there being much in the way of consensus.

I looked at my own stats at the time and couldn't see much of a pattern but then I don't trust any of the stats either Blogger or Google Analytics give me. Even though they supposedly come from the same source, they frequently differ by at least an order of magnitude, which doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

Even so, it does seem a bit daft to introduce a major, new feature on a Sunday. I mean, who starts anything on a Sunday? And I'm already making things difficult for myself by shoe-horning the thing into Blaugust, when I know everyone will be drowning in posts, barely managing to skim-read half of them, if they even try. 

If I'd thought it through properly, I'd have begun the feature back in June or July and finished it during Blaugust. That would have worked particularly well since the posts are going to tail off naturally in the back third anyway, when there will be much less to say about the topic I've chosen, for reasons that will become apparent quite quickly. Posts like that would have been perfect for filling those slack days when I was too tired after work to put anything hefty together and it wouldn't have mattered all that much if they didn't get the attention they otherwise might have done.

The reason I didn't think that far ahead was mostly because I was so pleased with myself for coming up with the idea, I sat back and congratulated myself on how clever I'd been instead of working through the fine details, something I appear to be getting around to only now, having finally noticed the possible drawbacks this morning before work, as I sat down to hit publish and then thought better of it.

I still haven't decided exactly what to do about it. One option might be to publish the posts I've already written on weekdays, possibly even on the same days each week, which admittedly would be completely out of character and probably make me come out in hives. It would, however, free up those days for me to write something else, which I could then slot into the weekend gaps.

Another solution would be to introduce the feature on a weekday, giving anyone who might care enough about it to want to follow the series the best chance of noticing it, before trusting the momentum of their interest to carry them through to the posts that come out on weekends. 

Or I might be overthinking the whole thing. Probably that.

Either way, I have decided to post the introduction that would have appeared today, tomorrow instead. Where I take it after that, I guess we'll see. 

The good thing is, I appear to have solved the problem of what to post today by writing about the problem of what to post today. Not for the first time, either.

I guess all I need to do now is find a few pictures to brighten things up and I'm done. And all between getting home for work and having my tea! I call that a result.