DrunkenBlog

The lull

Some of you have emailed about what's going on with the blog... and yes, the posting has been very sporadic since the "Convergence Kills" post. There's nothing "wrong" with the blog per se, rather it's more of a combination of things, and does not mean stuff isn't going on behind the scenes.

The major problem with the sporadic nature of the blog is that I only allow myself to devote so much time to it, other things simply have to come first. DrunkenBlog seems to have taken on a life of it's own lately, and while that's great, it doesn't take care of the bills or my personal life... I basically allow myself 30 minutes to an hour per evening of DrunkenBlog-related activities.

Sometimes this means I'll be able to get 20 minutes in one night, and an hour and a half in the next. This is why you may see a week without a post, and them something of monster-length hits.

This still isn't a good explanation, but it starts to make more sense when you factor these in:

• I'm working on several chats for DrunkenBlog, on some really different types of subjects... and I do actually spend some time researching. Every one is different depending on how well I follow the program/industry to start, but they average between 3-8 hours of research so far.

  The 'chats' aren't your typical interviews, they're pretty long and fairly in-depth. So then you have to decide on several themes, then come up with an angle for the questions that will hopefully get you to where you want to go and be fun for everyone.

  I could blow through the research, but I value the time of those I'm having a chat with more-so than I do my own, and there's no sense in wasting theirs. There are at least four of these in the pipe, all at different levels of doneness and they should be on topics divergent enough that even if one isn't your cup of tea, the next one might be.

  But while the chats are time consuming, I happen to really like them. They're a lot of fun to do, and the feedback from them has been great. So while I could just not do the chats, or cut them way back (I estimate I could do 5-6 longer posts instead of one chat), it's worth it as far as I'm concerned.

• I lost some time changing things around in terms of layout. I moved the ads to areas that are very out of the way, which kinda sorta defeats the whole purpose... but to be honest they were kind of annoying me. Whatever shavings off the bandwidth bill they were providing was outweighed by the annoyance of where they were, but people seem to like that they're out of the way, so that's a good thing.

• I've resisted having the blog become a catch-all linkfest of cool things I find while I'm surfing around, or just general news, mostly just because the blog is a complete mess and isn't really setup for it. I'd probably want to at least setup separate categories feeds for those who just wanted the chats or the articles and not the other stuff.

  A more ideal solution would be to just integrate another weblog, which I'll probably do at some point, but I'd rather be working on new content over presentation since my time is so constricted. It took me forever just to add in comment-spam protection via MT-Blacklist (as an aside, I want to have that guys babies; that program has saved me incredibly amounts of time... and MT 3.0 is still missing much of its functionality) let alone some other things I've looked at, like moving to word press or a 'mobile feed'.

  I'm keeping a tally of all the things asked for, and they will get in eventually, it's all just a matter or prioritizing the resources.

• There are several bits of posts I'm working on putting together, especially some that tie up some loose ends from previous posts... I'm just trying to make sure I have my ducks in a row on some of the information I'm getting. These are coming soon, again it's just the time thing getting split six ways from sunday.

• The email thing has gotten a little out of hand. Awhile back I made this decision where if someone emails me via DrunkenBlog, or asks a question in the comments about something I've written, I'd respond in kind. There are various reasons for making this decision, which I may go into in another post... but the basic gist was if someone took the time to sit down and write out their thoughts to me, the least I could do was respond in kind. Plus they make my day.

  This worked ok when it was several here and there, but has stopped working ok when it's a few hundred in a few days. Please do keep sending in the email and feedback, both positive and negative, I incorporate it all into the back of my brain at the very least. They're all cool, so keep sending.

  But where in the past if you sent me a page-long email, you'd get a page-long one back, that is probably going to have to come to an end for the moment now that I've gotten all of these out. They'll always get acknowledged, but it's just gotten a little out of hand.

Anyways, enough of the whining; a lot of cool stuff is coming, it's just taking me awhile. But do stick around.

 Posted by drunkenbatman
    August 15, 2004, at 10:19 PM