The Writing Process Blog Tour (Hannah Givens)

07/29/2014 Leave a comment

Here is Hannah’s response on the Writing Process Blog Tour! Like me, she hit on blogging and fiction… she went for a third, however, and added her history writing!

I didn’t cover how I do research/history writing (as a fellow history major!) but I noticed many similarities. How I learned to work on history also informs a lot of how I write other things now, especially blog posts. Collect what you’re going to talk about, your outside sources (or links), and then outline, and then write. By the time you’re writing, it can be a breeze!

Also – I love the Writing Process as shown in pictures of Robert Downey Jr. – worth checking out her post just for this!

H's avatarHannah Reads Books

I was tagged for the Writing Process Blog Tour by CompGeekDavid of DBCII and Comparative Geeks! I appreciate it very much, and I really enjoy both those blogs, check them out!

The rules for the tour are simple:

  1. Link to the previous blogger
  2. Answer the four writing-process-related questions
  3. Nominate/tag three more bloggers

Here are my nominees before I get going. I tried to pick people who haven’t been tagged yet… If you don’t do awards or chain posts (or have already done this one), no worries, just consider this a shout-out.

  1. Nerd in the Brain. This awesome geeky blog posts several times a day, and I’d love to know how Emily gets it done!
  2. Only Fragments. I haven’t been following this blog for long and I’m still figuring out what goes on, but basically there are stories and poems about the same two characters in any number…

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A Year and a Half of Comparative Geeks! (The Sunday Re-Blog)

07/27/2014 1 Comment

This last week was the 18-month mark for Comparative Geeks! I did some more reflecting on some of the new top posts – as well as some of the posts that could use some more love. It was interesting to look at both segments!

CompGeeksDavid's avatarComparative Geeks

I like enjoying these small milestones, to remember how much we have accomplished in this time! 475 posts, and consistently posting 6 posts a week, has been a lot of work, and very rewarding. Thank you to all of you, our readers and commenters and followers and friends.

Last year at the six-month mark, I did a post highlighting our top posts and topics thus far. Many of those posts are still top posts, because they keep getting search engine hits. However, we have a few new contenders top posts that I would like to highlight – beyond the Illuminati post I referenced the other day.

Then I thought I would share a few of the posts that have barely been touched. Sure, there’s a lot of those – and a lot of them make sense. There’s our failed Trailer Watch category – those never did well. And there are…

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My Writing Process (Alex Hurst)

07/22/2014 2 Comments

When I tagged Alex Hurst for the Writing Process Blog Tour, I had failed to notice she had already answered it! Here are her answers and nominations for this – good stuff! Enjoy!

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One Month of Features – Thoughts!

07/18/2014 3 Comments

Yesterday I talked about the stats difference from doing Features on a regular basis. As these things go, when you post more frequently, you get more views! It’s like science.

However, I have some more direct learning and thoughts after a month worth of Features. Even if the stats say “doing features is good!” what does that really mean – and do I need to keep up with these same features? A few questions to consider!

Learning More about WordPress

So the first thing that really happened when I started to work on setting up Features was that I started learning more about WordPress. I found a couple of things in particular. One is a setting that makes it so people can like and share posts directly from the Home Page/Archives Scroll. For the Photo Blogging I have been doing, this is a big step, I think – there is no reason someone really needs to click into these posts; they can read and/or see everything from the home page.

I considered this when it comes to Comparative Geeks, as well. However, while we have been writing a bit of shorter posts lately (after what we learned in the A to Z Challenge), most of them still use the “More” separator, to keep the home page from being massive, to hide spoilers, and just generally because it’s how we write and present our posts. So people need to click into them to get the whole thing anyway – so the liking and interacting can all be “hidden” there, without it being troublesome. But with these simple photo posts, no reason to add steps!

Another thing I have found out is that Tweets with line breaks don’t get picked up in the feed on WordPress, so most of my Six Word Story posts haven’t shown up here. So I probably shouldn’t post them like this:

[tweet https://twitter.com/dbc_ii/status/484861322706698240]

The other thing I learned is that there is a Screen Options menu, hidden away on every post you work on!

Screen Options

If, like me, you’ve never noticed/clicked that before, give it a go! Here you can pick which additional menus or options you have to work with, below your post. For instance, you can write a custom Excerpt for the WordPress Reader or RSS feeds – something I have seen other blogs do, but had no idea how to do myself! It also includes the options for manually turning comments, trackbacks and pingbacks, etc. on and off. Or for choosing who the author on a post is! So many options! That I had no idea about. Fellow WordPress bloggers: give this a look!

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One Month of Features – Stats!

07/17/2014 1 Comment

As is my wont, now that I have experimented with something, it’s time to consider it! What has the blog looked like because of features? Let’s look at the stats!

Blog views for the past month, by day.

Blog views for the past month, by day.

Okay, so there have been daily visitors, with peaks for original content – the first one is Introducing Features, the next one is my first feature post, and then the big spike in later June is the Writing Process Blog Tour. The day with no views was 4th of July weekend, and was a day when I did not post anything. Since then, a few a day.

The other thing those stats show is that this is a really small blog – incredibly low view count in general. So having features has accomplished a few things. First, it’s given a reason for people to check out the site on a more consistent basis. But second, it has me actually creating and putting things here – the first step, really, to having more engagement in general with the blog. So really, I think these stats show the picture much better:

Average blog visitors per day.

Average blog visitors per day.

This shows that this really has been a pretty uneventful blog. Then I did the A to Z Challenge in April and that spiked things considerably! In an effort to not waste the connections formed during the challenge or the momentum gained, I think the features are a good way to keep this blog alive and moving forward! And the best thing to see is that, with features kicking in there in June, you can see that there is a more steady number of visitors per day than the blog has seen before – even if it’s only a handful of people per day!

One part of this also is that the posts are so short that people might be taking them in without visiting the site – which is fine! – but that means that some of the likes and views aren’t showing up in the stats, but people are still experiencing the content! I think this is just going to be an effect of photo blogging. In my experience already, there are posts that get interaction (likes) through the reader because of pictures – without generating views. At least with these, there isn’t any content being “missed” because of this effect!

Okay, so those are some of the quantitative aspects of what Features have done for the blog! Tomorrow, I’ll be considering some of the qualitative aspects – what have features done for me? What have people liked? These sorts of things! But for now, let me know what you think of the Features I’ve been doing! Have you been stopping by here more? What would you like to see? Let me know!

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