Bloggasm

In case you didn’t notice, I published four feature articles for Bloggasm last week, a personal record. It used to be that I felt lucky if I could post one feature article — and in this instance I’m using the word “feature” loosely to describe any post where I have to do original research, whether it’s conducting phone interviews with sources or analyzing data — a month. Lately I’ve been averaging two articles a week.

It has certainly taken its toll. If I want to write and publish an article it usually means staying up until two in the morning. And that’s not counting the time that it actually takes to conduct phone interviews and transcribe them (I use a digital voice recorder). I usually don’t get home from work until 6 p.m. and I typically set aside an hour or so to work out and eat dinner. After writing, editing and posting an article I then crawl into bed at two or three in the morning only to have to get up again four hours later.

Given that I can only work on the site during my nights and weekends I only really have time to write one post a day. Because of this I get the desire to make that one post count. But this odd thing has happened lately. On my days where I don’t plan on writing a feature article, when I just want to maybe throw up a quickie post with a small link or video, I find it harder to do so. For instance I came across a good post today written by another blogger, and while I probably should have just linked to the post I instead emailed him and asked him if I could interview him about it. My journalist brain took his post and created a whole theme around it. I started thinking of what other people I could interview for this article. Before you know it, a simple link has evolved into a 2,000+ word narrative journalism piece.

I’ve definitely been enjoying myself for the past two months with this increased feature article production. I just don’t know how much longer I can keep up the pace. How many times can I stay up until three in the morning before I burn out?

Finally, after more than two years, Bloggasm has a new design. It got to the point where I absolutely hated the theme I had but every time I tried to change things I ended up breaking something.

Once again, my friend Stephen saved the day by not only upgrading my account but also switching me to a much-easier-to-read theme. The font is bigger. The color scheme is black on white. The entire page is much simpler. I really like it.

So if you’re reading this in a feed reader, click on over and check it out.

So I naively thought that upgrading wordpress might be as simple as pushing a “update wordpress now” button, but a brief look at this page shows that it may take more tech skills than I actually have. Is anybody a web expert with wordpress and know how to update it? Please email me at simon.bloggasm@gmail.com or comment.

So most people will think I’m stupid for this, but so far I’ve been manually moderating nearly 100% of my comments. Basically, if you’ve made a comment I’ve approved in the past, all future comments from that same IP address will be posted without moderation. Everything else — both spam and new legitimate comments — goes directly into my moderation queue.

Up until recently, this was a big time suck but still manageable. As long as I cleaned out the queue once or twice a day, it was usually fine. Luckily, 90% of spam is easily spotted when quickly scrolling down a page. If I went more than a day without cleaning it out, I basically just had to mass delete the whole folder because it wasn’t worth it scrolling through 600 pieces of spam just for one or two legitimate comments.

But within the last week or two the volume of spam has stepped up another level, and so I don’t know how much longer I can go at this pace. I probably need to install some kind of CAPTCHA wordpress filter. And since I’ll already be doing that, I might as well upgrade my Wordpress account, something I haven’t done in nearly two years.

It’s getting to the point that when I see a picture lacking a caption of successful Web 2.0 website owners I can recognize and name the people in the picture the same way a person might be able to name celebrities just by face-recognition. I’m guessing this is a good thing.

This is my first Sunday that I have almost completely to myself (most weekends I travel to see my girlfriend an hour away) and I’ve taken the opportunity to do some house cleaning, both figuratively and literally. Part of that house cleaning involves shooing these media-related links out the door.

1. Have you ever wondered the difference between marketing, advertising, PR, and branding? Well, now you have this hilarious illustration to spell it out for you.

2. For weeks now, Tor Books has been giving away free ebooks of its print titles. Every week a new ebook is sent out to their mailing list. What’s most interesting (to me) about these mailings is that some of the authors are posting updates on their book sales and how giving away free ebooks affected their print sales. Tobias Buckell, whose novel Crystal Rain was recently given away in the mailing, posts graphs that show a recent spike in sales after the giveaway.

3. On a slightly related note, remember how Google has completely fucked me over in its recent indexing? Well, to find my Bloggasm article linked above about Tor’s ebooks, I Googled the words “Bloggasm” and “tor books” assuming that that post would come up first. I ended up having to skip through two or three pages of search results before I found it. Fucking ridiculous. And you know what showed up first in the search results before the actual article? All the dozens of blog posts that linked to the article.

4. This article makes me extremely jealous. It’s about a newspaper media critic who took a buyout and now runs a media website full time. My pipe dreams have become this guy’s reality.

5. More and more social networking scandals are breaking every week, these sites are likely going to create a whole new field of study for sociologists. This week’s scandal comes to us via New York, an article about school systems struggling to respond to libelous teacher attacks on Facebook.

6. Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald tries his hand at satire by summarizing a recent AP profile on Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

So since Bloggasm’s creation I’ve written 799 posts. Now that I’ve been harshly downgraded in Google’s index for most posts, apparently the only thing I’ve produced of any worth in those two years is a post about nerdy pick-up lines and one about feminist porn. At least that’s the only thing I can conclude when I see that probably 95% of my Google traffic now goes to those two posts. Why did they remain at the top while practically everything else got hit? I mean, that post on Feminist porn is nearly two years old and I don’t even remember if anybody linked to it.

Sorry, I don’t mean to obsess over this. One bit of good news is that I read at least one SEO post today that predicted that Google is still in mid-dance and that the rankings will improve once again when it finishes updating. I guess I’ll give it until the end of April to judge whether this is permanent.