A Blog's Heartbeat
Well, I've officially been blogging forever, in Internet Years. Here's my first post, from April 16th, 2002.
"Well, it's up. After screwing with FTP permissions on and off for a week, my weblog is up. Sigh, I'm blogging. We'll see how long it lasts."
What a powerful first post. Moving, really. ;) A harbinger of great things.
I noticed a kind of a pattern in the numbers next to the Months, like September 2007 (21), and graphed it real quick. Looks like I post an average of 32 posts a month over the last 5 years, with outliers clipped (a trimmed mean). I started slow, with just 21 posts in the first six months, then something happened. Somewhere in October of 2002, I found my blog's (first) voice, did 44 posts, and haven't shut up since. The max? An obnoxious 64 posts in June of 2004 - of widely varying quality, but a few classics that get lots of traffic today.
I started on Radio Userland as a blogging platform, then decided a few short months later that it wasn't working for me. I moved to DasBlog in September of 2003, and posted about how to redirect all my old content and comments.
Aside, my original Radio blog is still out there, as Radio won't let you 301/302 your links, but the template included a META redirect and a Javascript timed redirect, and I've imported ALL that content into DasBlog (hence some of the funky generated titles - there was a time when Radio let you post to your blog without titles) and you'll get auto-redirected to the same post.
Now, I've got 1914 posts, counting this one. I may start doing a "greatest hits" or maybe a Popular Posts link so folks can come straight to the 10-15 posts they most likely came looking for. What do you think? LifeHacker does a Retro Roundup each week. Kind of a "this day in history" post. I could probably do one once a month. Just a thought.
At any rate, the point of this post. I believe that a blog has a heartbeat. Mine, without me thinking about it is about 32 posts per month or 32ppm. I think it's probably good to have a consistent one, while the number isn't that important, the tempo is. There are some blogs I read that are 5ppm or less, but they make each post count. For example, Atwood's blog is consistently about 20ppm (guess) but they are 90% gold. Slashdot's is hundreds of ppm but I've stopped caring.
What is your Blog's Heartbeat? What's your Blog's PPM?
You can click on that ppm image above for a Paint.NET layered file if you want to make your own PPM image.
About Scott
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.
About Newsletter
Two reasons:
1. There's already a lot in the top nav and adding another will only clutter.
2. The HTML alone for the current archive is >1.5MB. Casual visitors don't want a 1.5MB page when they click on a topnav link.
My $0.02. (Retail value 1/100 of a penny. Not valid with any other offer.)
October 21, 2002:
"Matt Griffith Did Me A Solid Today By Having A Nice A Hrefhttpmattgriff"
Needless to say, the blog has been among the best since then. Here's to another five years of outstanding posts! I'll probably have half of the 2012 Tools list installed on my 16-core, eight-monitor pentium :-)
Now, I don't see the point for a "greatest hits" section, as we readers either come from RSS/addiction (thus we read everything) or web searches (which I assume are ending on the proper "hot" post for them in the first place). Are there many visitors "spidering" through your posts?
I find no use for Top X or greatest posts since I read them all and older posts are history to me as I move forward to reading new posts everyday. I always skip Lifehacker's TGIF piece.
What I have found a mystery is the disappearance of "Other blogs I read" section from many blogs. Since "smart" bloggers tend to read other "smart" people blogs, it gave me an opportunity to get introduced to good blogs. However now I ask myself why they stopped doing it.
The posts per month thing is interesting, I never thought about it. I figured mine out to be 6.15ppm since I started blogging in June 2004. I kind of figured it would be higher, but I guess that makes sense; I've only made 246 posts as of today.
My first blog was about drunken college randomness (with pics of course). I'm still reluctant to post too much online. I fear of some of my code finds its way to worsethanfailure and will live on the internet...forever.
I think that would be cool. Also, I always skip the LifeHacker round-ups as well. Because, either I have already read them or already skipped them in the past. Please do not make your blog so commercial like that.
I like the unpredictability of this blog.
Cheers.
(and I have to say it... you graphed your blog entries? You are such a geek.)
I have been blogging now for about 9 months. My blog's heartbeat is about 14. I have my favorites of your blogs and I generally just use your search to find the subject that I want. There is no way I can, or would want to, remember the month that you made the certain post I am looking for at the given visit.
You have so much stuff on the right navbar that I don't look there much. If you could get stuff on the left to balance out the page, it might be worth people checking out all the cool stuff you have.
-Phillip
Comments are closed.
Personally, I'd vote against a "standard" roundup post. I loved Lifehacker, but it drove me away with so many re-hashed "roundup" posts and a poor signal to noise ratio (for my particular interests, to be fair). I think you should only link to your own posts organically such as related posts to a current/new post, or if something strikes you to point people back to an old post (in other words a post now and then that just highlights some old posts with some new context would be certainly justifiable). But I think it's not necessary just to iterate through a best of as a regular part of your RSS feed. Maybe a "best of" page/section?