Best local blog: the return
This will be the third year that I provide the opportunity to secure bragging rights as the best local blog around, as determined by my readers. For the last two years, the music-based blog afterthegoldrush has come away victorious thanks to Ridgely Griffith’s loyal following, and he’ll get the chance to defend his title this time around as well.
But things will be a little different this year. Last year I had 24 contenders, but it seems that a number of them have fallen by the wayside over the last 12 months. There are 13 which didn’t return because they stopped posting on a regular basis, and I probably could have eliminated another few which are getting updated rather infrequently – but then I would have been back down to a dozen as I was two years ago. Still, I cobbled together a list of 18 contenders – but if you want to nominate another that’s not on the list feel free to comment and I’ll check it out. But there are some guidelines: the blog must be updated regularly (ideally at least once a week), it must be locally based (essentially within the lower Delmarva area), and it can’t be a personality-based website. Those I have so far are all sites I link to, so there are likely others I’m unaware of.
Given those parameters, here are the 18 which will be contending. An asterisk (*) means they are new this year.
- afterthegoldrush
- Atomic Donkey Brewing*
- Chesapeake Journal*
- Crisfield News
- Delmar DustPan
- Delmarva Observer (formerly Delmarva Dealings)
- Delmarva Progressive*
- Delmarva Shorebirds Blog
- Lower Eastern Shore News (formerly The Salisbury Grinch)
- Random Thoughts of a Citymouse
- Reflections on Delmarva’s Past*
- Right Coast Conservative (formerly Right Coast Girl or just Right Coast)
- Salisbury News
- Salisbury Soapbox
- Sussex County Angel*
- The Other Salisbury News*
- The Pocomoke Public Eye
- Twirling, Twirling, Twirling Towards Freedom
If others are included, I’ll work these into the schedule somehow in order to maintain groupings of three, with wildcards added as necessary.
The first poll will be Monday, so blog owners need to let their supporters know this holiday tradition is back!
monoblogue turns six
Another year, another dollar. Actually, $95.40 to be exact because that’s my server fee for the year.
As I embark on another year of monoblogue and celebrate the achievements of the last, I’m reminded of something I wrote five years ago this very day:
On my previous blog site, my best week readership-wise was 197 readers (according to my Site Meter) but generally I would get between 30 and 50 readers a week. I was hoping for 100-200 a week from monoblogue…
Sheesh, did I have low goals or what? Since that point, I have had over 250,000 readers – and that’s the ones my Site Meter and other tracking systems caught. If you add in the places where I’ve had my works reprinted and republished I daresay I’m well into seven figures. Judging by the decline of my Alexa numbers (lower is good, and I reached my all-time low today of 333,458 for world rank and sit at a near-record 57,457 for U.S. rank) I figure someone has to be reading this space.
Getting an audience isn’t that difficult, though – the trick is keeping them. Once I had over 5,000 readers in a day (my Rushalanche) but most of them have drifted away. Not for lack of trying to keep them, though.
I normally don’t share a lot of readership information (although my Site Meter has been open for most of the time I’ve had it) but when I checked the other night my analytics showed that just under 56% of my readers were “new” while the other 44% or so were “returning” visitors. Presumably, if I had 1,000 visitors in a given time period, 440 of them had visited previously.
However, I also checked the trailing three months and found the percentage of return visitors had increased from 42% to 44% – not huge, but encouraging. Obviously I don’t want 100% return visitors because that would mean my audience had reached a saturation point but I think something in the 50-60 percent range would be healthy. So that’s my first goal for the next year. I don’t doubt readership will jump – I have a mostly political site and it’s an election year – but I want them to be a base for even bigger things in the years to come. So they have to be regular readers and a foundation to build around.
The second goal for 2012 is to fill out my advertiser base.
Unlike some other sites, I really don’t want ads to line both sidebars all the way down the page because, frankly, it looks terrible for the site layout and it’s not fair to the advertisers at the bottom who may never be seen if I write a truncated post. But I would like to first of all maintain my loyal advertisers – thanks goes to John Robinson and the Robinson Family of Businesses, Marty Pusey at The Perfect Dress, and Muir Boda of Sby4Rent.Com – and add three to seven more. I think 6 to 10 advertisers is a reachable goal, and given the fact my readership extends well beyond the local area it may be a good opportunity for national or regional clients. I don’t charge a ton for space, and perhaps it means I don’t monetize this site like I should, selling myself short. But I’d rather have plenty of business charging a little than no business charging a lot.
Oh, by the way, I’m also an Amazon.com affiliate so if you have Christmas shopping to do, by all means do it through monoblogue.
My third goal is going to be the most difficult to achieve. You see, for most of the last three years I wasn’t working outside the home, although that was certainly not by design or choice. When the local building industry went away, so did that fulltime job. And though I have accomplished a small amount of success as a freelance writer for various outlets, it’s not an easy market to break through in because millions of other people around the world fancy themselves as pundits, too.
So now I have a good job but it’s one which frequently necessitates I work for most of my day outside the home, therefore it’s not as easy for me to create plentiful content. Still, in looking at my monthly posting numbers I’ve found that I’ve put up nearly 500 posts over the last year so I get at least one in per day. Surprisingly, I’ve never cracked 60 posts a month or 600 in a calendar year so my pace isn’t that bad right now, and more importantly it’s manageable with my schedule. Granted, there will be times I’m a little behind on the news but my bread and butter is commentary anyway so if you can put up with 450 to 500 posts a year we’ll be just fine. That may violate the idea some bloggers have of writing no fewer than 2,500 words per day but I’d rather write 600 good words than 2,500 words of fluff. (Some take the easy way out and copy and paste to get to a certain number of words or posts, but I don’t – hence the phrase up top “mostly original content.”)
My last goal, though, is probably the most important for my goals in the long run. You see, everything I have built here comes because I have taken the high road, stuck to the facts and reasoned opinions, and stayed away from making this a personality-based site. Unfortunately, from time to time I get caught up in the various personality battles which occur in this small town, no matter how much I try to stay away. I am getting better at this, though, and perhaps it’s a sign of maturity on the part of all the local blogging participants that the “blog wars” are more or less behind us. By no means do all the local website owners like each other, and as a group we ain’t going to be singing “Kumbaya” by the campfire anytime soon, but the differences of opinion seem to be a little more civil.
Admittedly, I don’t think I’m ever going to be everyone’s cup of tea – certainly some readers probably can’t figure out why I do Shorebird of the Week or Weekend of local rock on a political site, but that’s what keeps me from getting burned out.
And Lord knows I don’t often pull my punches when I write, but I don’t lose sleep over my content and that’s what’s important. For a website, respect is the toughest thing to build and the easiest thing to lose.
With that, I start anew on another year of this website. As always, I’m hoping to make it a better year than the last one and there’s a lot of writing I want to get to before the next year closes on monoblogue, including wrapping up a manuscript I’ve been working with off and on over the last three years. It may be ready by year’s end, so if you know something about publishing I’m all ears.
In closing, I want to give thanks to my readers and my supporters. I’m not always on the winning side of the fights I pick and choose, but (as it were) I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees. There’s plenty of fight left in me and battles everywhere I turn, so there’s no use waiting on me to give up this ship or not having fun in the process.
1 vs. 100
Well, okay, it’s not quite on the scale of the game show but one has to snicker at the thought of covering a protest in front of Andy Harris’s office that draws 20 people. Shoot, the TEA Party got more than that to go to former Congressman Frank Kratovil’s office, brought a noose, and still couldn’t get any local media attention besides local bloggers like me. Never mind that we’d get 300 or 400 for a nice local gathering, whether in the bright sunshine or pouring rain.
Are you being served?
After this post, my readers will either think I’m crazy or revel in my genius. I guess that’s all up to you.
I was having a conversation with a friend the other day when the subject turned to some local news topics. My friend was very adamant that certain points of view weren’t getting out and the conversation turned in a direction I’ll share in a little bit.
But first, let me preface this with a little history lesson. How about winding the clock back to around 1980? Ah yes, the Reagan vs. Carter “are you better off than you were four years ago?” election. I can paraphrase that and ask the question “Are you more informed about local news than you were thirty years ago?”
You see, I don’t know what the situation on the ground was here on Delmarva – apparently WMDT-TV was still in its infancy but WBOC-TV and the Daily Times were already here. It’s similar to what I grew up with in rural northwest Ohio – three local television stations with news at noon, 6, and 11, the one Toledo daily newspaper, and a weekly paper in the closest town. In other words, local news wasn’t that easy to come by because there was only a few minutes devoted to it on television and the newspapers gave it to you a day (or even a week for hyperlocal news) later.
Obviously the game has changed in the three decades since. Another phenomenon just barely started in 1980 was the 24/7 news cycle brought on by cable news networks. Add to that the advent of the internet as a news source – but not just a static source like print, because we can feature audio, video, or both. We even have some real-time aspects and most likely the advances in technology will soon make on-the-spot live video reporting possible for even technophobes like us. (For all I know, maybe that’s available. I just write this stuff and place the jump in an appropriate place.)
Tired of the argument?
You know, once in awhile I have to take my fellows to task.
Perhaps it’s because I have such convincing arguments or maybe I have scared all the liberals away, but I don’t get a high number of comments on my website. (Well, I get a lot of comments but 99% are of the spam variety, which Akismet takes care of.)
So once in awhile I feel I have to give feedback to others. Included in this was a comment I sent in to the newly rechristened Lower Eastern Shore News regarding Jonathan Taylor’s criticism of the two dissenting voters in a recent County Council vote to allow overtime for building inspectors and other county employees in order to approve work on the rolling 4 1/2 day ‘Extreme Makeover‘ project.
My comment addressed three premises in playing devil’s advocate:
- The idea that the county’s FY2012 budget is approved, and a general query as to where he would suggest cutting to make up this expense.
- What sort of lasting impact this national exposure would have, as in if someone could name other cities which have had ‘Extreme Makeover’ homes without Googling it. (I don’t watch the show, so I wouldn’t know.)
- The hypocricy of Taylor complaining about a $10,000 annual expense to the city to provide health insurance for part-time employees but feeling just fine about spending this $7,000 of county money.
I placed none of the seven words which cannot be said on television in the comment, and thought I had legitimate questions. Yet Taylor rejected it, saying he was “tired of having the argument…when you get on this Republican high horse is when you lose reason.”
But I think Culver and Holloway have a legitimate reason for voting their way – citing the fact ‘Extreme Makeover’ is a for-profit enterprise while the county denies taxpayer funds to non-profits – while the other five had their reasons for voting yes, primarily as a boost to the local economy and tourism. (That may be a stretch.) In the end, Taylor got his wish and I said as much. Personally, I would have tried to take the money from somewhere else to make it a zero-sum game so I’m not going to criticize Culver and Holloway for their vote. Nor do I think the other five are off base, since there’s a simple difference of opinion here and we may find the $7,000 is well-spent. Or we may not.
Ultimately Jonathan can run his website as he sees fit, and if rejecting comments because he’s “tired of the argument” is his best defense, well, I suppose I don’t have recourse there. I’d reprint the comment I sent in here on my site but it’s vanished into the ether of the internet like the thousands of spam comments I’ve sent packing have been. (There’s still 4,815 comments here, so that’s plenty of feedback over the years.)
The point is, though, had I been someone who didn’t have his own bully pulpit and decided to use it you would have never known the gist of what I said. I’m not saying I accept every comment I get, because obviously I don’t or there wouldn’t be 375,529 spam comments to my site now vanished.
Instead, my policy has always been that good comments help move the narrative along, so I reject as few as possible. In fact I like the ones which disagree with me because then I have to sharpen my arguments. So if you think Taylor was right, by all means tell me why.
My contention is that if you truly want to add to the discourse, you don’t get tired of the argument. Just ask yourself what else is missing when comments which are otherwise legitimate don’t get through.
Another goal to attain
Why, if it isn’t an invitation to narc on your neighbor. That pretty much sums up the content of Attackwatch.com, the latest Barack Obama attack website on GOP candidates like Mitt Romney and Rick Perry along with commentator Glenn Beck.
The site’s stated purpose is to “Get the facts. Fight the smears.” So I thought to myself, well, gee, that “fight the smears” line sure sounds familiar. Indeed it was. I talked about this same thing back in 2008, when I saw “smear” as the new buzzword. I guess Barack thinks we have short memories.
Back then, some of the topics of conversation were his birth certificate (of course), campaign finance, Bill Ayers, his religious faith, and ACORN. But this time he’s attacking others by name.
Yet I notice there’s one topic of conversation he can’t avoid discussion on: our dreadful economic circumstances. Can he say unemployment is lower now than when he took office? No. Can he say fewer people are on food stamps now than when he took office? No. How about gasoline prices – are they lower now? Nope. Three key indicators of economic health, three bad results, three facts. Try and smear me on those, Mr. President.
But I’m cheered to report the page has already sprung some great parodies. So there is hope for us, at least until Obama takes over the internet. Or is that just another smear?
And now for something competely different (sort of): Today I got another fun e-mail from Obama campaign asking me to donate $10 and get a car magnet. As Deputy Campaign Manager Julianna Smoot says:
When people see us out in the neighborhood showing support with our clothing, our dog leashes, our cars, or our water bottles, it starts conversations. You might get a chance to tell someone why you’re supporting the President, and maybe even convince someone to sign up to volunteer.
Now, honestly, an Obama dog leash? Wouldn’t that be considered animal cruelty?
As for a car magnet, why would I want to kill my car’s resale value like that?
Then again, I suppose one could see this as an intelligence test of sorts – if they have something with Obama 2012 on it, well…let’s hope they’re not reproducing, right? Go to an unemployment line with items like that and the only conversation that may start is derisive laughter. They may run off to volunteer – for Rick Perry.
I guess that’s the way things are these days in Obama’s America. Maybe this article can make the AttackWatch website; that would be a badge of achievement for me.
A new feature
A few weeks back I was contacted by an internet entrepreneur who wanted me to try his product. This happens from time to time, but his request was for an interesting reason.
It seems that the creator of SendLove.to had too many liberal websites already signed up and it was skewing his results. Somehow or other he got wind of this site and that it was conservative, and he asked me to install his plugin in order to balance things out.
So I thought, what have I got to lose and I installed it last night. (It was pretty easy, even for me – I’m not really all that much of a WordPress maven.) If you were reading the last dossier I put up and came to it from the Facebook page (thus, going directly to the article instead of through my main page) you may have noticed first that certain names are pretty in pink. In addition there are tabs on the bottom where the comments are with the names Mitt Romney, Nancy Pelosi, Al Sharpton, and others. You would see the three I mentioned again (and again in pink) if you saw this page as an individual page because SendLove scans a post’s content for certain keywords and highlights them to solicit your opinion on the person. You can simply vote them up or down, or add a comment.
I can see a couple minor bugs in it – for example, it wouldn’t let me get back to a couple of the tabs once I pulled another down – but even just the little bit I played with it was interesting. I can even bring up past articles and it will bring up any name they have in the system, so I just dinged Ben Cardin quite nicely. (Since I brought him into this post now you can too.) And it doesn’t work from the main page, although I’m told they’re working on this. Since a good portion of my traffic comes directly to a post from Facebook, Twitter, or a search engine this isn’t such a bad omission.
Obviously I talk about national issues and political figures quite a bit, so I would imagine regular readers have an opportunity to weigh in a lot about particular people and follow the discussion from post to post (these are not wedded to one post like a normal comment.) I noticed Nancy Pelosi has a high national rating, for example, so my readers are going to have to take care of that.
As I figured would happen after Labor Day passed my readership is back on the upswing. So give this new feature a try and let me know how you like it.
David Craig (hearts) the Maryland conservative blogosphere
On Friday evening I, along with a number of other Maryland political bloggers, was invited to a confab with current Harford County Executive and likely 2014 statewide candidate David Craig.
Now unlike a lot of events, I chose beforehand not to provide a blow-by-blow account of the proceedings. I intentionally didn’t bring a notepad because I figured there weren’t going to be a lot of detailed questions or answers. I was sort of wrong, but that’s okay – why should I write the same thing four or five others may write? So what you’ll read are my observations of the evening, with a few pertinent items tossed in from memory.
Let me begin with a roster of the other bloggers who attended – there were six of us. I was told that there were about a dozen or so invited, but the list of non-attendees seems to be guarded like a state secret. And that’s fine, because I was just curious when I asked.
Besides yours truly, those who came in to Annapolis for dinner and conversation were Greg Kline and Brian Griffiths from Red Maryland, Bryan Sears and Brad Gerick from Patch.com, and Richard Cross, who does Cross Purposes. (He beat me to the punch with his thoughts on the evening.) It was a cordial conference with Craig and four of his staffers, and the conversations were broad in scope and depth around various parts of the table.
Besides dinner, we all received a party favor: the picture you see at the opening of the article comes from a flash drive Craig provided with his 2014 logo on the outside and various photos, background information, and news articles on the inside. Obviously it will be more useful once the 2012 election is over and Craig decides on whether he’ll seek the post of Governor, Comptroller, or Congressman – if I were a betting man I’d say that in rank order it’s about a 70-25-5 probability for which office he’ll run (the 70% being Governor.)
It was interesting how my fellow bloggers handled the evening. Sears (and to a lesser extent Gerick) treated this like an interview, asking pointed questions of the candidate about a number of statewide issues. Obviously Cross was taking some notes as well, while Kline and I did more listening. (Brian Griffiths came late since the Maryland GOP Executive Committee meeting was held down the street simultaneously to our gathering and he was representing the Maryland Young Republicans there.)
It’s funny that much of my direct conversation with Craig came when we talked about – baseball. He’s obviously familiar with the struggles of the O’s minor league system since the Aberdeen IronBirds play in his county and he could relate to my feelings about the Shorebirds. On the other hand, I wasn’t enthused about his ideas for league realignment but liked his stance on the designated hitter – indeed, it needs to go.
Ridin’ the storm out
Because of the weather conditions and the prospect I’m not going to have power, you probably won’t see new posts here until Monday.
As of right now, the Salisbury area is expecting the peak of the storm to hit about 2 a.m. Sunday, with sustained winds of 54 miles per hour. We could get 6″ of rain or more as well. Over in Ocean City, their sustained winds would be 67 m.p.h. – just short of hurricane strength, but certainly enough to do plenty of damage (not to mention the 6′ storm surge.) From my days in the architectural field, I recall that now mechanical and electrical units have to be set at 8′ above sea level, so it’s going to be very likely buildings may see significant damage in that regard too if the surge is just a bit higher.
We are pretty much as prepared as we will be; luckily it seems that the storm is weakening a bit more than first thought. Still, it’s going to be awhile (if ever) that we will be back to ‘normal.’
Oh, one other piece of good news: it’s likely we’ll never have to go through a Hurricane Irene again. Major hurricanes which affect large areas have their names retired, so the next cycle will have a new female “I” name. But what is it about “I” hurricanes? Isabel, Ike, and now Irene have been very damaging storms the last few years.
By the way, I have no clue why my website has been down from time to time. I’ve asked my server company to investigate but it’s one of those sporadic outages which drive me nuts.
Gary Johnson on ‘intolerance’ redux
A couple weeks ago, I commented on the remarks of Presidential candidate and former Governor of New Mexico Gary Johnson regarding the ‘offensive’ Family Leader Pledge signed by fellow GOP candidates Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum.
Yesterday I was invited to participate in a blogger conference call with Governor Johnson regarding intolerance as “a formula for Republican defeat.” Unfortunately I couldn’t participate directly but I asked for the transcript knowing this was an issue I’d broached previously.
Perhaps the question closest to the one I would have asked was offered by New Hampshire blogger Skip Murphy of Granite Grok. I’m going to shorten it just a touch for this purpose, though:
I do have a question about your opening statement, on social conservatives. Certainly the Tea Party is focused on the fiscal issues, but as we all know, social issues often have a fiscal cost to them as well. If you look at Medicaid, Social Security, other entitlement programs, have an outsized cost to them. Is it really something that Republicans and conservative Republicans should do? To concede the social issues to the Democrats and step away from that arena? And thereby letting them raise the fiscal costs of their agenda, versus fighting for what we believe is our agenda, which is cutting the fiscal costs across the board?
Governor Johnson responded:
Well, if you’re talking about fiscal costs, I don’t know where an intolerance to gays, I don’t know where a woman – where decision making should be taken away from a woman, and I’m talking about abortion – and, that that should be the driving issues of the Republican Party. And I guess I could go to immigration, and to the xenophobia about immigrants, and there are costs associated with illegal immigration. I think they should be addressed, but they don’t involve, in my opinion, building a fence, or putting the National Guard arm in arm across the border. There’s some real, rational steps that can be taken, and really, a win-win situation: immigrants that want to come in to this country to work being allowed to work. And businesses that would like to take advantage of being able to get workers that they currently can’t get, because of our immigration policies and our welfare policies in this country that have us sitting at home collecting welfare checks, that are just a little bit less money or the same amount of money for doing nothing, as opposed to getting out and getting an entry level job.
Murphy pressed further:
Well, I do notice that you brought up some hot button issues that are near and dear to a lot of Republicans. But I specifically asked about some of the other entitlements: certainly the ever growing welfare state is a social issue, and it certainly has a high fiscal cost. So, what is your strategy for bringing that down, and again I ask, is that something the Republicans should just forget about, because…
Johnson interrupted:
No, Skip, I didn’t consider welfare as part of this Ames Pledge. If I missed that, I certainly apologize. I saw this Ames Pledge as, really, vilifying, or just saying “No” to tolerance. I saw it as a very intolerant document. And I am a firm believer that we need to reform welfare in this country, and at the base of reforming welfare is “If you can work, you should work.”
It’s an interesting and broad-based conversation overall, but I think the problem with Gary’s approach is that a lot of the base he’s catering to – the small-government crowd – also cares about social issues.
Johnson makes the mistake of assuming that social conservatives are monolithic in their support of government-centered approaches to issues like abortion, gay marriage, and the general decline of society. As I noted in my original post on the Family Leader Pledge (refer to original pledge here,) I didn’t find a lot objectionable except for the call for a Constitutional amendment on marriage between one man and one woman. It’s not that I have an issue with protecting marriage, but it’s properly a state issue.
Ironically, Johnson is in agreement with me on that, but still chose to call me and others who care about these issues ‘intolerant’ because I don’t fall completely into line with his libertarian views on the subject. Perhaps he hasn’t a problem with certain portions of the Family Leader Pledge (particularly its call for a more limited government) but he chose not to sign it and that should have been enough. Many of the other contestants for the Presidential brass ring have forgone the opportunity as well but they haven’t besmirched the competition who did – even Mitt Romney withheld personal condemnation in refusing to sign.
Certainly I would like to pick and choose aspects of government to strengthen (yes, there are a few) and which ones should release their stranglehold on the American people. There are a few otherwise seldom-discussed planks in Johnson’s platform with which I agree and think should be brought out into the national conversation – chief among them the folly of the War on Drugs.
He certainly would like to limit government. Consider this passage from the call:
I just think that we’ve gone way overboard when it comes to this notion of need and entitlement, if you will. So I am promising to submit a balanced budget for the year 2013, which would cut 43% of government expenditures at existing levels. That means Medicaid, that means Medicare, that means military spending, for starters. So, in that context, 43% reduction with regard to everything it is that government does, I think that is a weeding out process that gets us closer to the notion of helping those that are truly in need as opposed to this notion of entitlement and really this give away that has us in the fiscal predicament that we are in. Really, we’re broke, and we’re on the verge of a monetary collapse because we print money to cover these obligations.
Good luck getting that through Congress. although it’s only cutting the budget back to 2002 levels. It also brings up a point that across-the-board cuts aren’t necessarily the correct solution – for example I think the budget of the Department of Education should be cut 100 percent, with the savings from the extra share used to maintain a strong national defense.
Yet the point is a good one. We haven’t prioritized spending in decades because the government gave itself a blank check with deficit spending, knowing they have the power to tax (also known as the power to destroy.) It’s time for some fiscal discipline, and I think TEA Party members understand this point. The question which Skip Murphy presented so well is whether we can have it all – advances in both social and fiscal conservatism – and I think the answer is yes, they are nowhere near mutually exclusive.
I would like to thank Gary Johnson’s staff for forwarding me the transcript. He’s been one of the best in working with bloggers, and that’s appreciated whether I agree with him or not.
Two thousand five hundred
It was almost a year ago that I hit my last ‘milestone’ post, and as part of that I outlined some of the websites that I’ve outlasted in the time that I’ve been online. Five hundred posts later, I’m still here as others fade into the woodwork.
But tonight I managed to hit a daily double, getting to another half a thousand posts on the half-year anniversary of my site. And after all the work outside the home and my various writing assignments that I complete each Wednesday, I finally have the chance to sit down and write about the most important aspect of this website: my readers.
Some may have ‘record days’ on a regular basis, but I’ve found over time that I have a loyal base of readers who come back day after day to partake in my opinion, news gathering, and photography. At times I do have more readers than others, as is often the case with a website that’s politically oriented, but many have come once and stuck around to be regular consumers of my writing.
So where do I go from here? Well, I have a lot on my plate these days but I plan on keeping on keeping on, grinding out posts on a daily basis. I still enjoy writing, and it’s good practice for my paying assignments. And with advertisers coming on board in recent months, what began as a hobby and creative outlet now makes me enough to pay for the server, anyway. (There’s always room for more, though!)
And don’t look now, but the 2012 campaign is slowly kicking into gear as more candidates enter various races. The bread and butter of this site is political coverage and comment, so I’ll have plenty to do.
So just keep coming back, and who knows – that 3,000th post might be here before we all know it. Thanks to each and every one of you for hanging here for some part of the first 2,500.
Update: Apparently mine isn’t the only local blogging milestone today. But I’d say this change is more like version 1.21 (rather than the version 1.5 claimed) since G.A. has been there quite awhile – about 4 years if memory serves. My advice for G.A. Harrison: just go back to what made the site good in the first place (original content) and it may become relevant again.
The PSA
It started with the Troopathon ad I put up a couple days ago, and now I’ve added a link to a charity show put on by the Chad Clifton Foundation, the 6th Annual Concert for a Random Soldier.
I know other blogs both locally and around the globe sometimes devote a little space to charitable events, so I’m not doing anything groundbreaking here. But the advantage of having an ad is that the event gets continual promotion - just like a business does - except I’m giving the space for free. (Naturally it’s a somewhat less advantageous space than paying ads, but the server has to be paid for somehow.)
Truly I don’t mind putting in a little effort for the cause, since the extent of adding these is manipulating a widget. It’s not hard to put pretty pictures and links on my sidebar anymore as opposed to my old template, which needed to have the html added to a long file. Truthfully, it makes the site look “fuller” anyway.
Since local music is on my mind anyway with the addition of this widget, though, I think the time has come to make a subtraction as well.
With the rapid evolution of marketing for bands, it’s become harder and harder to make sure their websites are up to date. Instead of relying on just the now-dying Myspace, bands have moved on to a number of different venues like Facebook, Reverbnation, or restored the old-fashioned domain name and website (or all of the above.) Simply put, it’s difficult to verify that I’m placing the latest info onsite, not to mention how quickly bands change and break up. For example, I found out on Sunday that one of my favorite local groups (Order 6D-6) is no more.
So I think the time has come to dissolve the “local music” area of my website and delete those links. Normally I prune blogs which are inactive for three months, but given this moving target and the limited amount of free time I seem to have anymore, there are better uses of my time then to try and keep up with band links. Truth be told, I’d rather have nothing than have something that’s wrong.
Now if local bands want to advertise on my site, well, that’s negotiable. I just might cut you a deal. It’s not like I don’t give them promotion after the fact or place up their videos, but why not be here all the time instead of for just one post?
It’s food for thought, right?
So support these charitable causes I place in the PSA box, whether they’re musically related or not - they’re worth your time and effort.
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