You know one thing I kind of dislike about this urge to post lots of things, Blapril or not?
The sheer volume of unfinished drafts sitting in the "post" section of Blogger.
Not counting any fiction I'm working on, there's at least 5 articles from the recent couple of months still in draft form that I intend to publish. It's just that I look at what I'm working on, whether it makes sense to finish it now, and deciding that I'd be better off leaving them unfinished for now.
It's not like there aren't unfinished drafts in the blog's Post section; over the years we've accumulated quite a few of them.* A lot of those I started, got partway through, and decided to either table it for another time (that never came) or that it wasn't working and decided to abandon it. But now, with too many things to say but being uncertain in which order to say them, I have a lot of mostly finished posts that just need to be put in some semblance of order.
When I started blogging, I didn't expect this would be a problem. I thought that you'd write something, post it, and maybe you get some commentary from it, and that'd be the extent of my involvement in PC. However, with the dawn of the modern influencer movement has come the expansion of brand promotion, data analytics, and all sorts of other "non-content related" activities with running a blog.
Which, on the face of it, seems silly for a blog that is largely about a gaming movement that is long past its heyday.
Even if you discard --like I do-- a lot of the analytics, brand promotion, and other traditional "influencer" activities, you still have content that needs to be presented in a coherent way. And that's where my dilemma is.
When I have one major idea at a time, it's not a difficult matter to write, edit, and post. But if I get a lot of ideas at once --hey, my brain does kick in every once in a while-- sorting them out takes a few days. Or a week. Or two weeks.
But I guess the entire point of this massive jumble is that it's a good thing to have so much to say, but making sense of it all requires an understanding of blogging meta-issues that, to be honest, are not why you got into blogging in the first place.
Perhaps a better analogy is comparing blogging to cooking.
Both can be fun activities, and there are times when both feel a lot like work. With both you can take the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants approach and just make something with whatever you've got on-hand at the moment, whether it be a specific topic (blogging) or whatever is in your pantry (cooking). However, once you get into planning things out, you can then anticipate with regularity when you'll need to focus on different things. For example, some people do the "Taco Tuesday" or "Wine Wednesday" where they make meals that fit into a theme. Converting that into a blog, you can have a "WoW Wednesday" or a "Miscellaneous Monday" where a regular topic means you have a ready made posting direction.
Sure, you can mix and match elements as much as you like to keep things fresh, and gaming news has a way of interfering with the best made plans out there, but sticking to a regular schedule helps a person plan things out and also allows for consistent feedback.**
But in the end, whatever works for you is worth it.
If I'm going to meet the Blapril scheduling demands, however, I need to be in more of a planning mode if I'm going to order my unfinished posts properly as well as meet the increased demands of many posts in a month.
(The same goes for cooking, given that we're in lockdown for the foreseeable future.)
Oh, and one more non-blogging tip: despite my skepticism, air fryers work. I didn't ask for one and I had no intention of buying one, but I was given one for the Holidays this past Winter. Once I realized that a so-called "air fryer" is actually a mini convection oven, that opens up all sorts of avenues for cooking that I didn't have before. But yes, you can make killer onion rings in them, too.
#Blapril2020
*I can officially say "we" because Soul has exactly one in there from eons ago. Still, it's a blank entry, so I guess it might not count.
**Sheesh, I sound like a big data miner.
The sheer volume of unfinished drafts sitting in the "post" section of Blogger.
Not counting any fiction I'm working on, there's at least 5 articles from the recent couple of months still in draft form that I intend to publish. It's just that I look at what I'm working on, whether it makes sense to finish it now, and deciding that I'd be better off leaving them unfinished for now.
It's not like there aren't unfinished drafts in the blog's Post section; over the years we've accumulated quite a few of them.* A lot of those I started, got partway through, and decided to either table it for another time (that never came) or that it wasn't working and decided to abandon it. But now, with too many things to say but being uncertain in which order to say them, I have a lot of mostly finished posts that just need to be put in some semblance of order.
***
When I started blogging, I didn't expect this would be a problem. I thought that you'd write something, post it, and maybe you get some commentary from it, and that'd be the extent of my involvement in PC. However, with the dawn of the modern influencer movement has come the expansion of brand promotion, data analytics, and all sorts of other "non-content related" activities with running a blog.
Which, on the face of it, seems silly for a blog that is largely about a gaming movement that is long past its heyday.
Even if you discard --like I do-- a lot of the analytics, brand promotion, and other traditional "influencer" activities, you still have content that needs to be presented in a coherent way. And that's where my dilemma is.
When I have one major idea at a time, it's not a difficult matter to write, edit, and post. But if I get a lot of ideas at once --hey, my brain does kick in every once in a while-- sorting them out takes a few days. Or a week. Or two weeks.
But I guess the entire point of this massive jumble is that it's a good thing to have so much to say, but making sense of it all requires an understanding of blogging meta-issues that, to be honest, are not why you got into blogging in the first place.
***
Perhaps a better analogy is comparing blogging to cooking.
Both can be fun activities, and there are times when both feel a lot like work. With both you can take the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants approach and just make something with whatever you've got on-hand at the moment, whether it be a specific topic (blogging) or whatever is in your pantry (cooking). However, once you get into planning things out, you can then anticipate with regularity when you'll need to focus on different things. For example, some people do the "Taco Tuesday" or "Wine Wednesday" where they make meals that fit into a theme. Converting that into a blog, you can have a "WoW Wednesday" or a "Miscellaneous Monday" where a regular topic means you have a ready made posting direction.
Sure, you can mix and match elements as much as you like to keep things fresh, and gaming news has a way of interfering with the best made plans out there, but sticking to a regular schedule helps a person plan things out and also allows for consistent feedback.**
***
But in the end, whatever works for you is worth it.
If I'm going to meet the Blapril scheduling demands, however, I need to be in more of a planning mode if I'm going to order my unfinished posts properly as well as meet the increased demands of many posts in a month.
(The same goes for cooking, given that we're in lockdown for the foreseeable future.)
Oh, and one more non-blogging tip: despite my skepticism, air fryers work. I didn't ask for one and I had no intention of buying one, but I was given one for the Holidays this past Winter. Once I realized that a so-called "air fryer" is actually a mini convection oven, that opens up all sorts of avenues for cooking that I didn't have before. But yes, you can make killer onion rings in them, too.
#Blapril2020
*I can officially say "we" because Soul has exactly one in there from eons ago. Still, it's a blank entry, so I guess it might not count.
**Sheesh, I sound like a big data miner.
No comments:
Post a Comment