Blogging is hard

Just a week or so ago I apologized for blogging about blogging, and here I am again — soon it’s going to be like Twitter around here, where all the social media gurus tweet about how important Twitter is.

The good news, however, is that no one thinks blogging is important any more anyway, so we’re good.

Here’s the “content”:  I have this very good WordPress plugin on LIKELIHOOD OF CONFUSION® called “Old Post Promoter” that recycles old posts.  It actually changes the date stamp so it’s not just republishing it (duplicate content is a big SEO no-no); you can set the plugin to disclose the original date of posting, which of course you want to do.

“Hot” stories in the news or blogosphere seem to make into the rotation at a rate too frequent to be coincidence, but they say the rotation is random.  And I feel quite comfortable doing this because I set the interval to ensure that nothing fairly recent will be republished, and I do after all have six years of content here that in many cases would remain even more obscure than if I give some of these items a little air.  It also enables me to clean up old posts by removing junk code, broken links or graphics and updating items substantively.

What I have found, though, is that more and more of these old posts are, when they link back to new blogs I am telling readers about, linking to blogs that no longer exist.  If I ever have time to check on the status of blogs on my blogroll, too, I always find expired ones.I

Yes, blogging well is hard.  We all have dry spells, busy spells, hating blogging spells.  But as I said in that recent post, what people have to really do in terms of gut-checks before they launch a new blog is ask themselves if they’re interested in succeeding with it.  If they are, that means they’re prepared to do this forever, or until some rational point comes to stop.

Oh, don’t worry — this is not a j’accuse.  It’s no skin off my back if I promote a blog that flops due to a lack of commitment.  I still bought myself a post for that day and burnished my deserved reputation for bloggy generosity.

And maybe there’s a business plan to a short-term blogging career that makes sense.  Probably there is.  It’s… just too late for me, though.