New Personal Development Blog

Heh, “first kill your chicken”…. I enjoyed your post there about algorithms….

Getting visitors: spend some time on google, searching out other examples of sites with congruent interests. When you find a site that has excellence in directions which match your own, give it a link on your blog and notify the site owner that you’ve done so, inviting them to stop by your site.

Find blogs with similar interests using the same method. Post to them, and invite return visits. Use pingback/trackback when you post about your visits to those other blogs.

Add your site to google by hand. That won’t get you a better page rank, and it won’t guarantee you get spidered faster, but it can’t hurt.

Blogs are a powerful tool for publishing – personal publishing. Passion for your subject is a very important thing; if you’re passionate about it, word WILL get out and get around.

And the single most important thing? Having fun! If you’re not having fun with it, why do it?

Very small issue, but I would try to use the <read more> tag in some of your posts (like your home page). If you use the inverted pyrmaid style when writing (conclusion on top), one is able to scan through posts they might enjoy, rather than losing focus on all of them.

Another tiny little issue … hope you don’t mind … But what about the odd illustration or image here or there, just to add visual interest?

Just an idea ??

Um. The one thing I personally LOVED about it was the total lack of graphics. All that’s necessary is words – people need to use their imaginations instead of having graphics to lean on….

[Disclaimer: while I personally ADORE CRPGs, electronic games and their ilk in general have a very great deal to answer for when it comes to the disintegration and outright atrophy of imagination in the world today. If children never have to imagine graphically themselves (because Disney et al have done it for them) it’s a very very sad state of affairs. And that’s the end of THAT rant….]

Thanks for the pointers. I think implementing the read more system would be good.

I may add graphics to illustrate points later, but I want to keep the site simple. Too often I see websites that are just so busy with advertisements, flashing graphics and headlines I feel a bit overwhelmed. Trying to keep the design simple, only adding graphics in small doses, I feel would be more effective.

Also, add the META code for Keywords in your header.php file, up with the other meta stuff. I have done this, which I need to remove ALOT of mine, and I get alot of incoming hits from google and other search engines from just the keywords being listed in the META part.

<meta name="KeyWords" content="Your Keywords here"/>

I added the above code under this one:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

spencerp

Ok, guys and girls, let’s not be down on graphics. Graphics are our lives over here at my blog, and they aren’t a distraction, they are the reason we have a blog. Text without graphics is like stew without any seasoning. Sure, some people over-do anything. And some aren’t very good at graphics and put bad ones up. But keep graphics and photos in perspective– they are there to enhance communication, and if a visual says what you need it to say, then by all means, place it right where it belongs. Just don’t pepper everything you do with silly distractions. Our graphics at https://www.artondisk.com are there to entertain and educate, as well as motivate us to become better writers and illustrators. So far people tell us that this is working. You too can use graphics effectively and often.

I’ll climb down off my dingy brown splintered wobbly creaking soapbox now. Did you see that visual? ??

Nope.

1. I never need graphics to get a point – UNLESS the person attempting to MAKE the point can’t do it by simply writing it – with imaginative use of language. I do not now nor have I ever subscribed to the “picture worth more than words” theory – the people who came up with that must have failed 6th grade language class.

2. I’m on the world’s oldest slowest dialup phone lines – 30 year old analog, and no upgrades planned within my natural lifetime (around another 50 years – I figure I’ll make 110 easy). If you can’t do something to grab my interest in the written word, I’m not going to be there for anything else.

Sorry. There’s just too much reliance on pics. There’s too much blind following of “it’s no fun if you haven’t got it on *insert newest electronic toy name here*.

And that’s MY soapbox.

It depends on what your blog’s style is really. If you want a simple blog then pure text might be more appropriate. If you are trying to engage all of the readers senses and different thought processes you might want more graphics.

Frankly arguing about graphics seems like arguing about whether a blog should be the color red…

I certainly understand both sides of this question. Blogs are hopefully all different, which keeps them interesting. My blog is geared towards my corporate graphics and photogaphy clients in Atlanta, so naturally, since that is what we sell and do for a living it would make no sense to feed them words. They all have fast connections to the Internet and probably 50% of them use Photoshop, so they know where we are coming from. We are very “left-brained” people and visuals are an escape from the right-brained accounting and business world we have to deal with on the other side.
So, go on, enjoy using just words. The English language is especially beautiful when used appropriately and creatively. Our posts will always use both words and pictures because we are artists by profession.