Wednesday, November 15, 2006
They shoot blogs, don't they?
When you click on the link to a blog you a like, to a BLOGGER you like, and you get a blank page, or are forwarded to a generic search or marketing site, or suddenly it's a different person's blog (usually spam and/or porn), or the top post looks familiar and you realize there hasn't been a new one in weeks, or MONTHS, do you feel like you've been kicked in the stomach? This has happened to me so many times recently that I had to write about it:
One of the dichotomies of the online world is that on the one hand a website can literally outlive its owner, as shown here
http://mydeathspace.com/
while on the other hand even the best-established and longest-running site can vanish in an instant, with a single click. Despite being aware of the latter, it's always a shock to me when a blog disappears; why is it even NECESSARY for blogs to be deleted? Sure, there are times when a blogger's family, co-workers, school officials or whatever find their site and they have to bail out to avoid trouble, but why delete your blog just because you don't feel like blogging anymore? When a painter gives up making art, do they destroy all their paintings? Of course not!! So what is it about blogging that induces people to eliminate all the work they put into their posts and template just because they're bored, or busy, or burned out?
If you're contemplating this inexplicable step, consider the following:
1) You probably have content that your readers will be sad to lose; if you can't give them new stuff, why not at least leave them the old stuff?
2) Chances are, you WILL go back to blogging, and probably sooner rather than later (it's common to see new posts within a week of when a blogger swears off of it forever); when that happens, you'll likely want your old content again, and even if you've backed everything up, which you SHOULD be doing on a regular basis, it'll be a pain trying to reconstruct it all.
3) If you're feeling whatever it is that drives folks to want to remove their work from the blogosphere, and so are still compelled to delete rather than abandon:
a) Don't give up your URL; for some months, at least, it'll still be known by readers and search engines, and if you choose to return to blogging you'll want that to benefit YOU, not the 1st stranger who tried to get that URL.
b) PLEASE don't just leave an empty template or blank page at your URL; take 5 minutes to compose a line or 2 telling your readers what's up (include your email addy if you want people to keep in touch) so no one thinks you DIED.
If you're abandoning rather than deleting, you still owe your readers an explanation; you can update it as events progress, so don't lag about writing it. Also, as you're running for the exit, don't stop and take time out of your life to delete your blogroll; it seems crazy, but I can't tell you how many times I've seen a familiar blog abandoned and they've left everything on it EXCEPT their links... this is another element of blogging psychology that totally eludes me. The list of the blogs that you consider worthy enough to be advertised on your site is a valuable resource to all your visitors, so you should keep it forever; besides, it's a slap in the face to those bloggers to delete them but keep everything else, as if you disliked THEM more than the blog that you no longer care about.
If, instead of giving up blogging, you're leaving an established blog and moving to a new one: Don't make this move lightly, because in most cases your PageRank and readership will both take a beating. Unless you want to lose ALL your readers, you've got to keep the old URL and post the new URL on it; I don't mean keep it for a week, I mean keep it for long enough that even folks who only read you sporadically can find where you've gone... or keep it forever if it's free, why not? Even if you're copying all your old posts to your new blog, but especially if you AREN'T, don't delete the content from the old site; you want to keep its PageRank and search engine hits up for as long as possible, to maximize its ability to send referrals to the new site. And finally; if you're asking people to link to the new blog, be sure and put your blogroll on it... that's only fair.
If you want to do better than just posting your new URL on your old blog and hoping people will use it, you can make the old blog forward people automatically to the new one; a code generator for this exact thing can be found here
http://www.htmlbasix.com/forward.shtml
That doesn't help with search engines, though; if you have your own domain (on a server running Apache), you can use a "301 Redirect" to alert Google and a few others that the new URL should be substituted in their records for the old one. You can find the code for it here
http://www.seocompany.ca/seo/url-redirect.html
and detailed info here
http://www.tamingthebeast.net/articles3/spiders-301-redirect.htm
If you DON'T have your own domain, if you switch URL's you can kiss your PageRank goodbye... yet another reason why I'll NEVER leave Blogger.
Be VERY careful while you're moving your blog; I've read about several cases where someone somehow got "detached" from their old URL during the process and it got grabbed before they could reclaim it, thus leaving their readers with no way to find them or to even know that they're still blogging, just at another URL. And; don't get so wrapped up in setting up the new site that by the time you're done you're too burned out to post; the point of blogging IS still to post, NOT to have ever-fancier locations.
For those who were concerned about the monstrous food poisoning I described in my last post, I'm happy to report that, a week later, my husband and I are getting steadily closer to normal. We got some yogurt with 8 active cultures to repopulate our internal flora, and, although it helped ME a great deal (most notably eliminating my stomach pain), my husband had an unanticipated reaction; the night we ate it, he luckily stayed up working after I went to bed, and fell prey to the most protracted flatulent episode of his life... and that's saying ALOT coming from HIM. He farted about every 5 minutes for an HOUR, and then made the most loving decision of our marriage; he went to bed in his study... I'm still amazed that he didn't try to share the magic. Although he usually falls asleep the instant his head touches the pillow, laying down ramped up the bubble machine, and it kept him awake for 20 minutes; his description of how he'd be nodding off and then fart himself back awake had me howling with laughter... as did his amazement that he didn't die in his sleep from the "toxic cloud."
Did I mention that marriage is GROSS, lol?
One of the dichotomies of the online world is that on the one hand a website can literally outlive its owner, as shown here
http://mydeathspace.com/
while on the other hand even the best-established and longest-running site can vanish in an instant, with a single click. Despite being aware of the latter, it's always a shock to me when a blog disappears; why is it even NECESSARY for blogs to be deleted? Sure, there are times when a blogger's family, co-workers, school officials or whatever find their site and they have to bail out to avoid trouble, but why delete your blog just because you don't feel like blogging anymore? When a painter gives up making art, do they destroy all their paintings? Of course not!! So what is it about blogging that induces people to eliminate all the work they put into their posts and template just because they're bored, or busy, or burned out?
If you're contemplating this inexplicable step, consider the following:
1) You probably have content that your readers will be sad to lose; if you can't give them new stuff, why not at least leave them the old stuff?
2) Chances are, you WILL go back to blogging, and probably sooner rather than later (it's common to see new posts within a week of when a blogger swears off of it forever); when that happens, you'll likely want your old content again, and even if you've backed everything up, which you SHOULD be doing on a regular basis, it'll be a pain trying to reconstruct it all.
3) If you're feeling whatever it is that drives folks to want to remove their work from the blogosphere, and so are still compelled to delete rather than abandon:
a) Don't give up your URL; for some months, at least, it'll still be known by readers and search engines, and if you choose to return to blogging you'll want that to benefit YOU, not the 1st stranger who tried to get that URL.
b) PLEASE don't just leave an empty template or blank page at your URL; take 5 minutes to compose a line or 2 telling your readers what's up (include your email addy if you want people to keep in touch) so no one thinks you DIED.
If you're abandoning rather than deleting, you still owe your readers an explanation; you can update it as events progress, so don't lag about writing it. Also, as you're running for the exit, don't stop and take time out of your life to delete your blogroll; it seems crazy, but I can't tell you how many times I've seen a familiar blog abandoned and they've left everything on it EXCEPT their links... this is another element of blogging psychology that totally eludes me. The list of the blogs that you consider worthy enough to be advertised on your site is a valuable resource to all your visitors, so you should keep it forever; besides, it's a slap in the face to those bloggers to delete them but keep everything else, as if you disliked THEM more than the blog that you no longer care about.
If, instead of giving up blogging, you're leaving an established blog and moving to a new one: Don't make this move lightly, because in most cases your PageRank and readership will both take a beating. Unless you want to lose ALL your readers, you've got to keep the old URL and post the new URL on it; I don't mean keep it for a week, I mean keep it for long enough that even folks who only read you sporadically can find where you've gone... or keep it forever if it's free, why not? Even if you're copying all your old posts to your new blog, but especially if you AREN'T, don't delete the content from the old site; you want to keep its PageRank and search engine hits up for as long as possible, to maximize its ability to send referrals to the new site. And finally; if you're asking people to link to the new blog, be sure and put your blogroll on it... that's only fair.
If you want to do better than just posting your new URL on your old blog and hoping people will use it, you can make the old blog forward people automatically to the new one; a code generator for this exact thing can be found here
http://www.htmlbasix.com/forward.shtml
That doesn't help with search engines, though; if you have your own domain (on a server running Apache), you can use a "301 Redirect" to alert Google and a few others that the new URL should be substituted in their records for the old one. You can find the code for it here
http://www.seocompany.ca/seo/url-redirect.html
and detailed info here
http://www.tamingthebeast.net/articles3/spiders-301-redirect.htm
If you DON'T have your own domain, if you switch URL's you can kiss your PageRank goodbye... yet another reason why I'll NEVER leave Blogger.
Be VERY careful while you're moving your blog; I've read about several cases where someone somehow got "detached" from their old URL during the process and it got grabbed before they could reclaim it, thus leaving their readers with no way to find them or to even know that they're still blogging, just at another URL. And; don't get so wrapped up in setting up the new site that by the time you're done you're too burned out to post; the point of blogging IS still to post, NOT to have ever-fancier locations.
For those who were concerned about the monstrous food poisoning I described in my last post, I'm happy to report that, a week later, my husband and I are getting steadily closer to normal. We got some yogurt with 8 active cultures to repopulate our internal flora, and, although it helped ME a great deal (most notably eliminating my stomach pain), my husband had an unanticipated reaction; the night we ate it, he luckily stayed up working after I went to bed, and fell prey to the most protracted flatulent episode of his life... and that's saying ALOT coming from HIM. He farted about every 5 minutes for an HOUR, and then made the most loving decision of our marriage; he went to bed in his study... I'm still amazed that he didn't try to share the magic. Although he usually falls asleep the instant his head touches the pillow, laying down ramped up the bubble machine, and it kept him awake for 20 minutes; his description of how he'd be nodding off and then fart himself back awake had me howling with laughter... as did his amazement that he didn't die in his sleep from the "toxic cloud."
Did I mention that marriage is GROSS, lol?
