Blaugust Archives - Page 18 of 38 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Thanks Folks

August 3, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterday I made a blog post with one intended purpose, but it wound up being interpreted in a completely different way. I thought I might talk a little bit about this because as a blogger this is going to happen. We all view our posts through the lens of our experiences. No one can actually be inside your head or completely understand what it was that you meant by something. This is in part why I spend a lot of time retracing things I have already talked about in my blog posts because in my head… no one actually reads my content. The corollary of that however is that I feel like I need to write something that would make sense to someone who is hitting my blog for the first time. I do a lot of things like “for the uninitiated” call outs where I back track and explain why a thing is important to this topic. Granted this ends up increasing the length of my posts, but the hope is to keep someone from needing to furiously crawl through my back log of now over 1800 posts.

Ultimately for me personally, when something is so widely interpreted in a way I stop to think… is that ultimately the post I wrote without intending to. There are so many times that once fingers get started on the keyboard that posts sort of develop a mind of their own. I know there are writers out there that carefully choose every word and sentence to build a strong discussion about the topic they are referencing. Then there are others like me that get started and let the post develop as they go. The problem with that method however is that things can veer off in unintended directions. My intent in yesterdays post was to be some sort of a positive post about “these are my demons that I deal with but I still manage to get up and write every single day”. The idea was to share my personal struggle so the folks out there who are going through the same thing can know that they are absolutely not alone.

However I feel like maybe a little too much of those demons were on display, and the post maybe came out a little true to life. The hard truth is that I do not see in myself the person you all see in me. I find it as impossible to reconcile that as it is to develop the internal infrastructure to accept a compliment. That said… there were many times yesterday where I was almost brought to tears as the comments came in throughout the day. I had every intent to sit down and respond to each and every one of them… but I am still to this very moment a little too overcome with emotion to try tackling that task. I didn’t write a post with the intent of getting reinforcement from my community, but that was ultimately the result. I got a virtual war-cry from my friends to the equivalent of “we got your back!” and I appreciate it greatly… even though I am not entirely certain how to process it.

There is no real hyperbole intended in yesterdays post, because I sorta accidentally opened the door a little too wide to the self doubts that I hear inside of my head every single morning. That said I still hold my breath and hit that publish button. I am glad that there are people out there however that apparently believe in me so much more than I believe in myself. So many of the things that I have done in my life I did only because I felt like there was no one else out there to do them. I lead my first guild because I was concerned about what the future might bring for me if I didn’t step up and do that. I moved into a leadership role at work, because no one else was and the challenges that we were dealing with required more management than a bunch of independent developers. I stepped up to my current management position only because I was afraid for what might happen to the unity of our team if someone else took the reigns. A lot of the decisions I make are not out of a faith in my own abilities, but a fear in what might happen if I don’t do the thing that appears to need doing.

I was afraid that if I waited much longer that whatever was left of our community what fade away. It was my hope that it was not yet too late and by the fact that we have now tied our best year in participation it seems like I might have accidentally picked the right time to do this. The last couple of years have been extremely rough on this community, and my ultimately hope was that we could get back some of what we lost. There are blogs that are gone and likely never coming back, but we are bolstering those holes in our wall with brand new bloggers that will hopefully infuse us all with a level of excitement. I think it is impressive how far we have come in so short of a time. Each year the initiative has picked up steam as the process has gone on and the flood of topics pulls people out of the woodwork. Here are the numbers of past years…

2014 – 52 Participants
2015 – 88 Participants
2016 – 62 Participants
2017 – 0 (I failed to get it organized)
2018 – 88 Participants (so far, it is not too late to join in)

Also impressive at this point is we have 92 members active on the Discord with a large number of people who have just joined to participate in the conversations even though they may not be officially participating in the event. I do believe… we may have a community again and an extremely active one. Ultimately that was the thing I was missing the most, being part of something much larger than myself. There have always been some of us that spun topics off one another, because quite honestly we refused to accept the pronouncement that blogging was a dead art. It is my hope however that this version of Blaugust will be more forgiving when it comes to the after effects on the community. There are a lot of bloggers that in the crush to get their 31 posts in… have burned themselves out in the process only to close up shop shortly after the event ended. My hope with this year is that we are providing folks the tools to run the marathon, not the sprint and keep going for the rest of the year.

There are so many mornings that I feel like a little kid pretending to make a newspaper or sitting in a hollowed out cardboard box pretending to be on a television show. The truth is however that people are out there reading this and I am thankful of the kind words that you have shared with me. I will do my best to try and figure out how to accept them. I have more of a support structure than I deserve, and I am extremely thankful to everyone who has joined me in this madness. We are on a really interesting journey together and I don’t quite know where it is going… but I feel like it is going somewhere very special. So in so many words… thank you so much for the help and love and support and random hugs. Thanks for having my back. Lets go do awesome things together!

Talentless Hack

August 2, 2018 by Belghast

The other day Chestnut did an excellent post about Impostor Syndrome that you should check out if you have not. The fact that it is a real thing, doesn’t actually help me personally get over being mired in it at times. Right now I am fighting it massively as yesterday was the official first day of August and as such the beginning the periods where the posts start counting towards the totals. The problem is I am personally feeling overwhelmed with doubt. I am questioning who the hell I was to be thinking I should bring back Blaugust and at the same time try and cherry-pick aspects of the Newbie Blogger Initiative and other blogging community events. What gave me the right to be the one to do all of this?

Even more so… I question who I am to be giving advice to anyone. Most of the time I feel like a talentless hack that somehow mastered the ability to get up in the morning and spew nonsense into blog form. My claim to fame has always been longevity… not actually being good at anything. Who am I to even suggest anything out to another human being out there that is quite honestly probably already better at this than I am? My experiences are not unique and my gaming interactions aren’t particularly interesting… so why would I think that I should be documenting it and pushing it out there into the world. To make matters worse… I am not even good at life in general and I spent my days waiting for my workplace to catch on to the fact that I don’t actually know half of the things they think I do.

Ultimately… this is what my brain sounds like every moment of every day. There are times where it is really hard to push aside those little voices and keep moving forward. The thing is though… that I know I am not alone in this. Almost every friend of mine that I get to know, has their own version of this cadence playing in their head telling them that they are not good enough or strong enough to do something. It is very easy to let the voices win and slink back into the comfortable shadows trying to keep anyone from noticing you disappeared. The early days of my blog is filled with periods of time where the voices won, and silenced me.

I would accidentally find myself falling behind in posting because life happens, and then it became this massive barrier to get past to start again. I kept thinking that in order to make a post… it had to be good enough to make up for the amount of time I was gone from the blog. So if I was gone a month… then when I started posting again I needed something truly epic to talk about in a time when nothing in my life felt epic at all. Even to this day I never really understood what prompted me to start the experiment of getting up every single morning and writing anything that came to my mind. But the repetition and routine allowed me to push past that barrier and just start up again and the track record of doing it for so long… gave me empirical proof that I could in fact pull a post out of the ether every single day.

I am not a good writer. There are people who are participating in Blaugust that absolutely are, and take their craft extremely seriously. My blog is not one of those. I have come to accept that fact and instead focus on sharing my story with you the reader. I occasionally have nuggets of wisdom to pass along, or an interesting life experience… but more often than not it is the simple act of getting up and sharing something real with you every single morning that keeps this process going. It is a weird protracted one sided conversation that I am having with you, serialized a single day at a time and largely that is the method of communication that feels the most comfortable at times.

I can imagine that I have no readers at all and that I am just chronicling my ideas for my own purposes. I can imagine that I have a large audience out there when I want to feel more important. The act of creating something and thrusting it out into the world can be extremely therapeutic at times. I will admit however there is not a single morning that goes by that I don’t have to sort of hold my breath and push the publish button without thinking about it too much. This is why I don’t really edit my posts and you get them in their natural raw state… typos, word swaps and all. If I were to think about what I was just about to throw out into the world I would mire myself in the all too familiar cycle of analysis paralysis and self recrimination.

There are members of this initiative that talk about how they carefully edit each post to pair down the number of words, and that is brilliant advice if you are in fact the type of writer that can take it. For me personally… this blog is more compulsion than willful act at this point. The more I think through the process the more likely said process is to fail. The more I examine something the more I get caught in a loop of inaction because sitting in that silent place where I am forever weighing the outcomes occasionally feels good. The inertia of analysis is a pleasant thing. Every single morning is a struggle and to make up for my own failings… it is like I have tricked myself into hitting that publish button when I am still very much half asleep.

Over the last several years I have built up a level of honesty with my readers and part of that is sharing my own failings. I am not good at this and I have no right to be kick-starting the return of Blaugust. I did it however for the purely selfish reason of wanting to see more people out there doing the sort of thing that I do on a daily basis. I want more windows into other worlds where I am can sit down and partake of these elongated one-sided stories myself. I missed having a thick blogroll full of tales to experience any time I needed that to escape from my own frustrations and troubles into someone else’s world. I have no right at all to give advice but I will continue to share my experiences, because it seems to be the thing that I need to do each day to feel normal.

Syndication and Social Media

July 27, 2018 by Belghast

This morning I have struggled a bit to get off the ground and coalesce into writing something that might be valuable to someone else. One of the things you see a lot with my blog is me attempting to be honest with my readers. This isn’t really the point of this mornings post but i would say if you are struggling with something… let them in on it. I’ve said before that blogging is therapeutic and at the same time lowering your guard a bit is too. Now I am not saying that I recommend this practice for everyone, because it does in fact give trolls an attack vector.

The thing I wanted to talk to this morning is the interwoven relationship between blogging and social media. I can say without hyperbole that almost every one of my social media accounts exists because of this blog as I sussed it out as another possible syndication venue for my content. It is not a coincidence that both my twitter account and my blog both started in April of 2009, because twitter has long been the vehicle that bloggers get together to talk to one another. This is why I asked for twitter handle as part of the sign up instead of other social media options.

I think the reason for this is that twitter is better than any platform at the quick distribution of a blog link. You have enough characters to provide a quick summary, a link and an image enticing your readers to click through and visit your post. The retweet culture allows someone to pass your information on… without passing too much of themselves in the process and I think that simply leads to more folks passing more information around than on other platforms. Granted in the era of the quoted retweet that changed a bit, but I still feel like that platform is the best place to quickly distribute content.

The thing is… I don’t just think this I know this from the statistics. I’ve been running google analytics since day one and that has given me a lot of information about what works and what doesn’t work for the purpose of spreading my blog. If I had utilized this more fluently rather than the generally lazy way that I do… I could be a hell of a lot more popular than I actually am. However it does tell me things about which platforms work and which do not. Let’s talk for a moment about the content I share and where it gets consumed.

Direct Traffic and RSS

First off one of the things you need to know is that the majority of your readers are probably still to this day going to be consuming your content through an RSS Feed Reader. Before sitting down to write my post I ran some numbers for the past year of usage and only 14% of my traffic comes from any referral source. This means the majority of my readers are either coming in directly or through an RSS feed reader. There are some other statistics that I have through WordPress that tell me that the majority of my readers are in fact coming in through RSS.

I don’t want to necessarily talk about the numbers because I have a larger audience than some folks and a much smaller audience than others. I use analytics for the purpose of learning about the data not necessarily as creating a benchmark to judge my success on and I highly suggest if you decide to go down that road you adopt a similar stance. The big thing I want as a takeaway however is that RSS is in fact not dead and you are going to see a large number of your users that are not accessing your content directly. As a result I highly suggest you check your own blog out in a news reader and make sure it looks like you want it to look. Since I am not trying to drive ad venue I syndicate my entire blog out over RSS instead of snippets… your mileage may vary here.

Social Media

In the above bit I mentioned that only 14% of my readers come as referrals from any other source and that also includes social media. As it stands right now I syndicate my content in the places that are built into WordPress, so that when I hit publish it also sends my content out there as well. Here is a rundown of where all said content goes…

Twitter – This is my primary social network
Facebook – At some point along the line I created a Facebook account just for the blog. I don’t use this network much.
Google Plus – Hold out from that era when we thought Google Plus would rule the world and a lot of us bloggers started hanging out here.
GPlus “Page” – Similar hold out where I thought it was a good idea to create a Tales of the Aggronaut page.
Tumblr – I don’t even know why I do this, but it was an option in WordPress so might as well.

These are effectively the places that I can push to each day when I hit publish without further interaction. The only publish option that I am not utilizing is Path… which if I am being completely honest I don’t know what the hell it actually is. It’s seems to be an iPhone thing and since I am not an iDevice user I have never actually encountered it. Now since only 14% of my traffic comes in through referrals… I could make an argument that syndication doesn’t actually matter. However I feel like putting your stuff in front of as many eyeballs as possible is always going to be a generally good idea.

Let’s talk a bit about where that referral content is coming from.

25% – Twitter – this is my primary platform for engagement so it probably isn’t shocking that the vast majority of my click-through’s come from it. It probably says way more about my willingness to engage with it than the actual power of the platform. My tweets don’t really go viral so it isn’t like I am getting a crushing number of hits this way.
12% – Bhagpuss.blogspot.com – That is right… my appearance in the Inventory Full blog roll is quite literally beating every social media platform but twitter. Thanks Bhagpuss!
9% – Facebook – this shows up as a few different addresses but combined together it equates to a little less than 10% of the referral traffic.
2.5% – Google Plus – There are still folks actively using this platform in spite of the fact that I am not. At one point I had a nonsense number of people following me so there may be some residuals from that?
1.3% – Reddit – Not something I actively engage with but a handful of my blog posts have made their way to Reddit where they got significant action. Getting anything on Reddit means you are going to have a constant trickle of users from there clicking on the links as people search.
.32% – Tumblr – I mean it makes a lot of sense given that my posts are not exactly formatted in the Tumblr way and I don’t spend any time engaged with that platform other than occasionally going on a reblog bender reposting cool comic book art.

Now as an academic experiment I extended out my timeframe and looked at all traffic I have ever gotten to my blog. At that point a bunch of data points change… namely my referral rate goes up to 26% of my traffic and the influence of twitter drops to only 11% of that… with WoW.com coming in second at a little over 8% showing the sheer influence of being part of the World of Warcraft blogging community used to be. To round out the top five… you have Google Plus at number three, Facebook at number four, and Reddit at number five. It is funny how things change over time.

Engagement

Ultimately my take away from all of this is that social media syndication is worth it… but only if you plan to engage with those communities. I feel like my numbers don’t really point out that Twitter is the most superior platform but instead that it is the only platform I am willing to actively engage with. It is the place where people know my name and respond to the things I say… and on the other platforms I am just a weird guy that refuses to use his real name or picture. Granted my real name is pretty freaking easy to find and I have tweeted out my picture a few times… so it is a personal choice thing not like a witness protection program thing. Ultimately I feel like you get out of social media what you put into it as far as blogging goes. I still feel like it is my favorite way to link up with other bloggers, but especially now that we have the discord and how active it has been… maybe that could shift into being that primary vehicle of communication for the community.

Regardless don’t feel like you have to do social media if you are not comfortable doing it. My engagement brings me in some hits but in the grand scheme of things it accounts for a very small percentage of my total users. The effect that is impossible to capture however is where people found out about my site in the first place. I have a sneaking suspicion that if you somehow managed to factor that into the equation… then social media would have far more weight in the equation that it appears to have. I choose to put my stuff out there and over time have built a community of regular readers, and if you do the same you will build your own circle of readers as well.

Choosing a Platform

July 26, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterday I talked a bit about the name of your blog and why I felt like it was probably the single most important decision you made starting out. Today I am going to talk about a very close second… which is what platform you are going to be doing your blogging on. There are a bunch of competing software packages and hosting scenarios out there, but I am going to attempt to do my best to work through them with you this morning… or at least the major options. For the sake of transparency I myself use WordPress in a hosted environment and have for a very long time. There are pluses and negatives with that kind of set up, but a lot of the other options I have played with at one point or another.

Hosting vs SaaS

Ultimately your first real decision point is going to be… are you going to be using a cloud/software as a service (SaaS) model for your site or are you going to procure your own hosting environment and maintain the site yourself. This really is a question of how technical do you feel comfortable being? Sure most hosting providers give you the option of installing something like WordPress or Drupal from the web based back end with the click of a few buttons. However there will come a time at some point when you need to get your hands dirty in the innards of your software. So ultimately you need to ask yourself if you are comfortable having to do that.

Ultimately the big thing that hosting the software does is give you the freedom to be able to try out any new plugins or themes that come out, because you can effectively re-roll your site as often as you like because you have the tools to do so. Traditionally in a more SaaS model you are paying them to maintain the software where they give you a few configuration options but greatly limit your ability to install custom code. For example if I were not as lazy as I am… I could create a wordpress plugin to maintain all of the nonsense that we end up keeping track of with Blaugust. When we were utilizing Anook quite a bit within the blogging community there was one of the folks that created a custom integration that would allow you to have an auto updating version of your Anook feed in your blog sidebar.

In a SaaS model that sort of thing really isn’t possible because the software company is maintaining the risk of hosting your content. That means they need to make sure nothing that is happening on your blog will potentially negatively impact the other people on that platform. What this means is generally speaking you will not have to worry quite so much about attack vectors and making sure things are patched to the latest versions, and in truth are probably going to have a much more stress free blogging experience. However if you like to tinker with things… you will similarly likely never be happy with the constraints placed upon you by a blog provider.

Self Hosting

So when you decide to host your own blog you are going to need two things… a hosting provider and some blogging software. The first part of that I don’t have a lot of advice with. The service that I used to recommend hands down has gotten significantly less grand as time has gone on. The service that I contemplated moving to… is no longer open to new customers because it seems like it is ramping down. So you are left with a minefield of options… many of which I have heard both positive and negative things about. InMotion I have some decent experience with in the past and they offer a WordPress hosting option for $8.99 a month (that goes down if you pay for multiple months in a row) that offers some hack/malware protection software along with the package. Please note though I am not actively using them myself so I can’t really give it a full fledged thumbs up endorsement.

Once you have trudged through the hinterlands and decided where you are going to host your site, you need to pick a software package. This is also a deluge of choice because as many people as there are out there… there seem to be options for blog software. Some of the more common options are WordPress, Ghost, Jekyll and Movable Type. If you want more than just a blog you can look at things like Drupal or Joomla… but having had plenty of bad work experience with both I am not super fond of either. That said there are a ton of folks who love them and swear by them, so your mileage may vary. I would suggest that you look at pretty much all of the options, but in reality you are more than likely going to end up using WordPress. The reason being that there is simply more support from that community for blog-centric needs… and if you can think of it, there is likely already a plugin written to do the thing you want to do.

Once you have chosen something… you need to install it… which again is going to vary wildly based on the package that you choose. I said before that more than likely a few of these options are going to show up in the auto configuration tools that your web host will likely have. That said… automated WordPress installs in my experience often have issues. My preference is to just use the normal web based installer process in setting it up that involves you creating your own MySQL database (also through a web based tool your provider will give you like PHPMySQL) and then feeding that information into the web GUI to set everything up. If this sounds frustrating to you, then maybe the self hosting route is not your jam. Granted there are a bunch of us in the Blaugust community that are going to be more than happy to help you sort these sort of things out.

SaaS / Cloud Platforms

If you checked the hell out of the last sequence of paragraphs then maybe your best option is to go with a feature-lite but also stress-lite blogging platform. Here you have a wealth of options that are at your disposal. I have my preferences but I am going to talk about a long list of options that range from completely free, to “freemium”, to paid only. Quite honestly you can in theory blog with social media like Facebook or Google Plus… but that is very much not my jam. There is just too much platform rivalry and for every person like me that hates Facebook with a passion, there is someone else out there that hates some other platform with similar fury. One of the options I am talking about is in the more social space, but it makes for a pretty reasonable blog option as well. Essentially I am going to talk through some of these options as I view them. Take anything I say with a grain of salt.

WordPress.com – This is the fully hosted version of WordPress and lives in a halfway state between free and paid. Essentially you can roll a site within moments for free and have a something.wordpress.com address to send your readers to. They also offer a few premium features that you can pay for that get you closer to the WordPress.org self hosted experience, but you will never quite get that level of freedom. This is going to be the best option if you want to start out small but at some point down the line want to move to hosting your own blog, because it is trivial to move content from a wordpress.com install to a wordpress.org self hosted scenario. There is a really good mobile client for WordPress and for both self hosted and SaaS you can get in and write very solid posts with full picture and theme support from a phone/tablet without needing to rely on the web interface.
Blogger.com – This is the other big popular option for a quick and free blog. I’ve used this in the past at length and my very first blog existed here… and no I will never link it ever ever because it is embarrassing as hell. In many ways Blogger feels like it at some point got locked in the dotcom boom look and feel and never really evolved out of it. It still today feels very much as it did when it was competing with Live Journal and Xanga, and never really grew out of that era. There are folks however that completely swear by it.. and it has hands down the very best implementation of a blogroll out there. It also has very easy integration with google advertising if you plan on making money with your postings. The biggest issue is… every few years it feels like Google is about ready to kick it to the curb since they would really love you to use Google Plus as your blogging platform.
SquareSpace.com – This is a platform I have never used but have heard a lot of great things about especially in the customer service and site uptime departments. The reason why I have never used it is because there is no free option. This is paid software and you are essentially given two tiers of access… Personal for $16 a month or Business for $26 a month… with obvious price breaks for paying a year at a time. I hear they have a lot of really cool toys behind the scenes and a library full of resources to build your site out in a web based drag and drop editor. That said once again I have no personal experience with this and as a result can’t give a proper endorsement.
Tumblr.com – This one lives in a weird space between social media and blogging platform, and what you end up with instead is an option that is really good at relatively short posts with lots of media file support. There are folks who love Tumblr as a community, but I have never been super impressed with its often times hyperbolic nature. That said I syndicate out to Tumblr and often get readers that come in from it so there is at least some traction there… giving me a shocking number of followers on a platform I never really engage with. What Tumblr really has going for it is that it is extremely simple to use, has a great mobile friendly web client and is one of your more hands off options. You can do some pretty basic styling of a Tumblr blog but you will never really be able to do anything super crazy with it. I appreciate it for its simplicity and the fact that it lends itself to relatively short posts that I can quickly consume. Image Meme Tumblr is a thing and you are going to run into a lot of blogs that are nothing but reposts from fandoms… similarly NEVER EVER EVER EVER search for something on Tumblr that you love without the safe search filters on.

Many Important Decisions

The long and short of this is that you are going to be asked to make a lot of decisions that you may or may not know the full ramifications of at this point. I would suggest that you lead on the Blaugust community for support here because we each have our blogging platform of choice and some very valid reasons why we ended up that way. I am going to largely push folks towards WordPress because it gives you more options, however I am sure there is someone out there that just hates it and would send you off a completely different path. Ultimately there are ways to move content between providers, some of which are easier than others… but what I am telling you is that you are not necessarily locked into a decision right now that you will use for the rest of your life. I know my long time friend Calamity Jess has re-rolled her blog three or four times since our days in the WoW Blogging Community… and that is okay. The readers that really matter will follow you wherever you happen to be hanging your hat, and ultimately you have to make the decisions that make you happy.