Monday, July 28, 2008

Blog Format Questions

A few housekeeping questions, designed to make your experience here better. Remember that you can always answer anonymously (though there is surely no reason to).

Is the toolbar too busy? I was thinking about taking some of the categories of links, like Best of the Blog for example, and creating a single button that would take you to a page which would display all the links in that category.

Is the post frequency good? Should we only post weekdays? I put up posts weekends because I always want to read stuff on the weekends and places like Slate never have anything up then. But our numbers dip on the weekends -- Favorite Books, for example, was a post that got no attention because of when I put it up. Would as many as three posts a day be better if we had no posts on weekends?

Does Free Form Comments need to go up twice a week because it gets buried so fast? I feel like the speed at which good posts get buried is maybe a problem, but then I think frequent posts is a really good thing too.

Other suggestions?

7 comments:

Jason said...

A couple of the message boards I post to are formatted so that the topic at the top of the page is the one that was most recently posted to. Prevents something from sinking to the bottom before people are done arguing about it.

I'm not sure if there's a way to make a blog function that way, but ... it does seem like a shame sometimes when a topic sinks out of view not because people still aren't interested, but simply because you're being a conscientious blogger and posting new content every day.

Seems like there should be away to have the best of both worlds... but, again, maybe that's impossible, since this is a blog and not a message board...

Either way, don't stop the weekend posting, Doc! I love that!

Anonymous said...

Is one of Dr. Klock's superpowers mind reading :)

I was actually going to suggest a second Free Form Comments post.

I can see your point about the weekend posting... New postings are good but it can also give people time to catch up on commenting on previous post.

Maybe the weekends would be a good place to put the second Free Form Comments?

Wednesday covers new comic releases and DVD/CD stuff... a weekend post would be great for movie openings and to follow up on the week's earlier discussions.

Streeborama said...

I think Geoff needs his own message board as opposed to a blog. That way all of these great discussions won't get buried so quickly.

Coligo said...

Hey Geoff, I think your reviews and film/comic analysis posts are generally top-notch, even if I don't agree with your arguements, so I always want to see more of them.

I would say that with so many guest writers and their posts it seems less and less like 'Geoff Klocks blog', which I know was part of what you were looking for, but as I don't really come here for that it means I have to scan past loads of stuff and often have a hard time finding your posts; I've even missed entire entries because they were buried between other peoples work.

I appreciate that you've wanted to throw open the doors, which is a noble enterprise, but if I'm interested in one of the other posters work I'd be going to their blog (which I have done in the past). No offense intended to anyone, by the way.

Geoff Klock said...

Streebo: I considered that, but I am concerned about the upkeep and splitting us between two sites (especially since I do not know the tech to have one site with both a blog and a message board).

Coligo: that is a fair point. But if you have been reading a lot of blogs you see how hard they are to keep up and how often people post about how they have not posted in a while. With the site updating frequently we get and hold onto more people, which leads to better conversations.

What I may need is a better way to quickly distinguish who is writing at a glance. And that will help everyone. Because I am sure people like Doug are coming around here just for Jason's posts for example, which he probably is in danger of missing because of my posts.

When I opened to guest blogging I was thinking of magazines like Slate and Newsarama -- both those sites have headlines (and slate has bylines) which you click to read the essays -- maybe that is what we need. Anyone know how to do that?

Streeborama said...

Geoff: In that case, you are running the blog perfectly. A simple addition of another Free Form Comments should suffice.

When it comes to websites "content is king" as the saying goes. having something fresh everyday keeps your readers coming back every day.

I've always admired your tenacity in keeping the blog updated and fresh.

James said...

It just occurred to me that Jog has his own blog, and contributes to the Savage Critic(s), and I read both. Obviously that doesn't solve the problem of double-upkeep and splitting the audience, but it does give you a way of separating/clearly marking the Klock-content and the guest contributers. And you could easily separate each author's contributions on the multi-blog with tags etc. Just a thought.