Archive for the 'Blogs' Category

A list of blog lists

The Group Writing Project being conducted by Darren Rowse on ProBlogger has finished. A record 301 entries have been submitted.

Bloggers were asked to submit a list on a topic of their choice. I haven’t had a chance to read many of them yet but the few I have looked at are very interesting and well worth investigating. Over coming days I might even get enough time to feature here on this blog a few of those that impress me.

My submission is called Sixteen Scintillating Short Story Starters.

The full list of 301 submissions can be found here.

Are you a Problogger?

Ever wondered if your blogging efforts qualify you to be called a “problogger?”

If so, take the quiz on Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger page.

I scored 16 out of 40 points and it told me I was a “serious amateur” blogger with some potential.

Okay – just a bit of fun – now back to the serious stuff!

About the Problem of the About Page

Darren Rowse on ProBlogger is concerned about the lack of entries on the About Page on thousands of blogs that use WordPress.

One of the common problems that I find being made on many WordPress Blogs is the default ‘About Page’ being unchanged.

When I access a blog for the first time I often read the About page. It tells me who is writing the entries and gives me a better understanding of the author. When choosing a book to read and especially if I plan to buy it, I check out the biographical notes about the author. This will often give the credentials of the author. Can the author be trusted? Are they qualified to write on the topic? What is the author’s background and life experiences?

The author biographical notes will often influence my purchase of a book. The same is true when I start reading a blog on a regular basis. I want to know about the author and his or her credentials etc. It influences me on whether I will read on and return regularly.

To that end, I am pleased that I had spent quite some time setting up my About pages on my three blogs in the early stages. You can read them on the links below. Note that there is some cross posting hence some repetition. After all, I am only one person, not three distinct individuals.

Related links:

How to build a better blog

Darren Rowse on ProBlogger has revisited a series of articles he wrote last year called “31 days to building a better blog.” These articles are must read items for anyone starting out on blogging, or struggling to establish a routine and effective methods of driving traffic to your blog.

Unintentional War Blogging

One of the blogs I read several times a week is Melly’s blog called All Kinds of Writing. The author writes about all kinds of things including life, the art of writing and the business of writing.

Melly lives with her husband in Toronto, Canada, but many of her family live in a war zone. They are right in the thick of it in Haifa, northern Israel. She recently decided that she needed to be with her family in these troubled times, so she flew to Israel.

She has continued to write her blog – with bombs falling all around her. And when the bombs stop, she has the courage to take photos of their impact on everyday life. She has posted a number of these photos already. Her writing gives the reader a graphic idea of what it is like to have a war in your face and personal, and how it affects the ordinary people and the everyday problems it causes.