As the owner / writer for three blogs, all of which are dedicated towards particular topics or niches, it’s sometimes difficult for me to keep my personal life away from the niches where I have a life-changing passion for. You see, I wouldn’t be blogging about the topic unless I was passionate about it anyway, and where such passions exist, things like life happens, and have repercussions on the overall blog, and on my way of thinking.
However, on my longest running blog, Scrapability, it’s noticable when I go off topic and start talking about – say – writing – or a personal life – that I suddenly lose one or two subscribed readers. Many on that blog are only interested in one portion of my life – that of providing scrapbooking information and news. When I start talking about something else, those particular readers get bored with my blog, and quite legitimately so, as they signed up for a reason. Such is the fundamentals of blogging in niches. It’s nothing personal, but it can sometimes find me, as a blog writer, feeling somewhat compartmentalised, and at the worst of times, demotivated. And that has obvious ramifications on my work and on how I face the blogs themselves.
From the Cutewriting blog comes the idea of incorporating a blog widget with text updates somewhere from within the blog – Cutewriting calls this a microblog within the blog. If it’s done in a widget, the contents won’t be published to the feed readers out there, but will remain visible to any who stop by regularly and are more intimate with the blogger as a person.
A text widget can be used to post updates of a personal nature, link to interesting off-topic links, make announcements, or provide a brief summary contents index of your latest posts. For my three blogs, I can use the updates to simply notify my readers of my additional work on outside projects – such as the other two blogs, for instance).
Cutewriting has a section called Today’s Special at the top of the page which is an example of the principle in action.
Technically, the implementation of such a section is dependent on your blogging platform. Some platforms allow you to simply create a normal item (or blog) and choose for it not to be fed out in an RSS feed. If you have a “sticky” ability – to make sure the post remains at the top - then you can simply rewrite this one microblog or text post each day. Your main entries will still be posted to your menu system and fed out to your RSS subscribers as normal.
Other blogs on different platforms may require the use of a text widget, and it’s placement via CSS or templates into an area on the homepage, the sidebar, header or footer. It would best be placed somewhere at the top, and obvious to the casual browser also.
Here’s How I’ve Implemented the Idea for my Own Three Blogs, Using their Current Configurations:
Wordpress
Wordpress Users can look for a plugin called WP-Sticky which allows you to appoint a post as either sticky (for the day) or an announcement (permanently) as the top post on the page. Specific themes for Wordpress also can include top header bars where text can be input away from the posts.
For both my Juiced on Writing and Juiced on Ebooks blogs, I decided upon the WP-Sticky approach to making my top post an announcement post. The Juiced on Ebooks blog actually (currently) has a designed header section with an About section which I could have changed over to the News section I wanted, but this would have necessitated going into the html or php files each time my news changed. I do not, at this point, feel I have enough CSS or PHP knowledge to be able to insert some kind of widget into that section to allow me to change the text more easily.
I also initially went looking for sidebar widgets which would allow such text entries. There are a couple of sidebar tab menu systems which can save some vertical space by combining several plugins or areas into the one menu system. However none are exactly what I want at this point in time.
So, for both Juiced on Writing and Juiced on Ebooks, I’ve simply inserted a new post – as an announcement at the top. Announcements (using the WP-Sticky plugin) stay at the top of the blog or journal main page forever, whereas Stickies stay for the day. To make these newsy out-of-theme posts less intrusive for the blog reader, I’ve used the More or split tag function within the post, forcing the user to click on “Read More…” to go to view the actual bullet points if they really are interested.
Unfortunately this opion means that the first publication of the What’s Happening post on both blogs will go out on RSS feeds and the like – but only the first one. After this I can simply edit and update the date and my own personal projects whenever I want, and the top post on my blog will be updated with it, without going out as another RSS feed.
Squarespace
For my longstanding scrapbooking blog, Scrapability, I took another tack on this. This blog is hosted on Squarespace, and although I can easily change themes / templates and CSS internally, there are no dedicated widgets for Squarespace users.
Instead, I could have found and inserted any text-based widget via html as a plugin into the sidebar, and very easily. But I couldn’t create a sticky post which would always be on top of the blog entries, not without publishing the entry at a calendar date way into the future anyway.
With the Scrapability blog I decided to make better use of a current page onsite which I’d created as a homepage. Like Wordpress, Squarespace pages don’t feed out to RSS feeds. They are static. So I took my almost valueless Homepage and turned it into the personal and brief update page for all my other projects. This has been renamed to “Other Daily Updates” and is the top link on the main sidebar panel. Anyone who wishes to will be able to go there for personal updates. I’ll also post interesting links I’ve been browsing around, and tidbits of news onto that page, and send RSS blog readers there with quick posts through the normal blog pages if I think appropriate.
These posts may also be of interest:
Tue, Sep 23, 2008
Blogging