May 28, 2008 4:30pm
Things have been incredibly busy and stressful at chez nous recently. The beloved is acting in a senior role for a couple of months, which basically means she's doing two jobs, I'm trying to get some serious work done on my PhD so I can submit before the end of the year (a little late, but not outrageous), we're looking at interstate business opportunities, considering getting some work done on our house (it _really_ needs it), I'm trying to continue to contribute to Habari, and there are all those other little bits and pieces of life that seem to take up so much time, some good some bad. Oh, and going to French class once a week. The long and the short of it is that I haven't had much time or brain space for blogging for a couple of weeks.
I try to average a post every two days, 15 posts a month. Most of the time I make it somewhere near that, but I won't this month unless some really exciting things happen in the next day that I really have to blog. So the question I have for you today is, if things are hectic and there isn't much blogging happening, but the blog isn't headed for the deadpool any time soon, should bloggers tell their readers (or reader) that it's temporary? Are you as a reader just going to be annoyed at a content-free post clogging up your newsreader, or do you like to hear this stuff from the people you read? Does it depend on who they are? Is a one-liner along the lines of, "Madness in the house (not the band), having a blogging break for a couple of weeks," worthwhile? How many questions at the end of a blog post is overkill? Oh, that's another topic ....
May 28th, 2008 at 8:41pm
Tricky. I truly despise trite posts like 'Feeling poorly so no blogging from me for a while.' or 'Road trip to Disneyworld so no posts for the next 10 days'.
However, this post is slightly more than that so is interesting and justified IMHO.
I used to torture myself with maintaining a bloging frequency thinking that it somehow mattered. Now I don't because I know it doesn't.
I post what I like when I like and my various 'outputs' are horrendously fragmented (worse than an Oracle 7 table in a dictionary managed tablespace).
I use RSS so it doesn't matter to me whether you maintain a radio silence lasting 2 days, 2 months or 2 years. I'll be here listening whenever your re-appear.
It takes an awful lot for me to unsubscribe to a blog.
May 28th, 2008 at 8:48pm
I don't think there's any obligation to tell your readers you're on a hiatus. It's your site, your journal: you decide what to post, and when.
I have always avoided arbitrary goals like "post at least once a week" because sometimes several weeks in a row are so mundane as to not produce anything worth sharing with total strangers.
May 28th, 2008 at 8:51pm
Funnily enough. I also used to despise questions at the tail end of a blog post because, to me, it simply smacks of desperation.
This was more aimed at (semi-) professional blogging sites though who almost always sign off with a tantalising, thought prvoking question. Os so they think.
On a personal blog, less so.
May 28th, 2008 at 8:52pm
Really really wish this blog used Disqus so I could fix those typos.
May 29th, 2008 at 1:06am
I like to know that someone I like to read won't be posting for awhile. It saves wondering what happened to them and whether they've abandoned the blog or are just too busy to work on it.
May 29th, 2008 at 11:18am
Some for, some against. Ironically enough, posting this probably contributed to me making my other post for the day. I'm sure it's not just me who works on momentum.
The reason I have a posting goal is that it's too easy to let things slide. I _like_ writing, but it takes some effort. If I don't have a goal, I'm likely to think, "Hey, that's {cool, interesting, disgusting, outrageous}" and not tack on, "I should blog about it."
Obviously when I don't meet my posting goal I'm not going to give myself too much of a hard time about it.
Oh, and I will move to Disqus when I have the time and energy to write a proper plugin for it :)