Introducing Features

06/17/2014 7 Comments

I shared a post the other day that has really inspired me on figuring out my content here on DBCII. It’s perhaps unsurprising that the idea came from Gene’O, of The Writing Catalog, as he is someone who blogs similarly to how I do.

The idea presented, and one I see a lot in reading blogs, is features. Posts that you can just expect to see, daily, or weekly. As a creator, they help you know what content you’ll need to create, to keep your blog going. As a reader, they help you expect what you’ll see, let you know to come back for more later when you find something you like.

Gene’O lists a number of features on Sourcerer that they run, but I thought I would note a few of my other favorites. On Love Pirate’s Ship’s Log, there’s a quote of the day. I love them – generally a picture from a movie or TV episode, and then a few lines of quote. They just make me stop and smile as I skim through my WordPress reader. Another favorite is the Box Office Top 10 on We Minored in Film, which just fill me with joy each week as I read it.

I see other features, such as episode recaps and reviews of popular shows, or Wednesday New Comics (it’s nice that most all new comics come out on one day, for the purpose of blogging about it!). These are the sorts of features we might consider on Comparative Geeks, but at the same time, because others are doing it, we want to leave it to them. Because we do so little content, as it were – with just our 6 posts a week – features would eat up a lot of that.

Also, it would force us to keep up with shows or reading comics or whatever we chose – which is against what we’re doing with the blog. We are writing for the joy of it, for the thought and sharing, and forcing timelines like that on ourselves would not be great. The closest we get is our ongoing LitFlix – where we read the book/comics and then see the movie.

And we have other ongoing series, like Science Fiction Today, Character Studies, or Science Fiction and Religion, but we don’t follow a schedule on those… it’s more like we try to do at least one of those a month. We could try to make these a scheduled feature, but they’re more of just an ongoing series, and for a blog, those are good too.

So let me introduce the features I am planning on here! Read more of this post

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Efficient Blogging: The Power of Features (The Sunday Re-Blog)

06/15/2014 7 Comments

Doubling up today on Re-Blogs for reasons that will soon become apparent. This post has really inspired me, and I’ve been thinking about ways it applies. I think the answer is: it apples here on DBCII. Expect some features to come!

Sourcerer's avatarSourcerer

One thing six months of blogging has taught me is that, if your goal is to update a blog every day, you have to find ways to create posts that don’t take a lot of time. If you’re blogging to attract a readership (and not everyone is, but I am), you’re investing words and time in your blog and hoping for a return in reads and engagement. So when I talk about efficiency, I’m asking a question:

How can I produce a post that’s good — one people will actually like — and do it as quickly as possible?

Before I go any further, let me just say: I don’t believe it’s necessary to post every day to have a successful blog. It’s much more important to produce quality work, and to find ways of bringing it to the attention of goodwriter memepeople who are interested in whatever you’re blogging about…

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A to Z Recovery and Reflections

05/08/2014 16 Comments

Hello all! Thanks for stopping by my blog once more. Last week saw the end of the A to Z Challenge here on DBCII, and a great many other blogs, and it was a genuinely fun time. Just looking at my archives, that was by far the most posts in a month that this blog has seen. It adds a fantastic collection of reflections on writing to the blog, really beefing up the purpose of the blog. And, with completing the challenge on two blogs, it really got me writing!

survivor-atoz [2014]I did a reflection and looking-forward post on Comparative Geeks yesterday, and it was good to do so. For Comparative Geeks, it was a zero-sum change in the amount of content we did in the month: we regularly post Monday to Saturday, once a day, so the challenge’s rules matched perfectly. We went with a theme, so it got us blogging about characters for a whole month, which I think is good. Our character studies are regularly some of our most popular posts, so I think all of these are going to remain popular over time. At least, I hope so; I hope that the challenge-themed titles and such don’t detract from the posts. The one that got away from me was the one on Hermione and Harry – and the recent J.K. Rowling comments surrounding them. Which is a fun and relevant post here, too: does the author really get to challenge the meaning or content of their stories once written? Feel free to check it out and join in the conversation!

Anyway, I’ve been thinking and decompressing, and a four-day vacation helped. But it has me thinking about the state of the blog; the purpose of the blog, and my blogging; the future of my writing. Which is all supposed to happen, I think, doing something like this challenge. So below are some of my thoughts after working through the A to Z Challenge.

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#Blog Series Pitch: Social Media Sorcery – The Sunday Re-Blog

03/16/2014 Leave a comment

Great idea for some posts from a blogger who is trying many things with Social Media right now. Also a lot of conversation in the comments, so definitely check that out as well – and pitch in with your experiences and thoughts!

Gene'O's avatarMy Former Blog

I have to create a social media document for my own use, and since I’m seeing interest in that aspect of my blogging, I thought I would pitch it as a series. Here’s a basic outline. Each Roman Numeral represents a post.

I can go one of two ways. I can add it to my list, write it as I need it, and run it as an occasional series for one of our blogs. Or, I can write the whole thing as a single piece, then break it into posts, illustrate them, and shop them as a guest series. I have to write a rough draft-quality version of it sometime soon, anyway, because I need it to analyze what I am doing and improve my game.

I. A short narrative that explains how we started. It will include links to the things we wrote about social media along the way…

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A to Z Challenge – My Post Topics

03/05/2014 10 Comments

A to Z Challenge 2014

One of the many things you can do to interact with and grow community on a blog is to participate in blogging events or challenges. Some that come to mind are Feminist Friday, NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month), and, coming up next month, the A to Z Blogging Challenge.

The idea is to post 26 days in the month – all but the Sundays in April – on a theme, and with something starting with each letter of the alphabet. By the end, I feel like you’ll have some great content, or at least some content. The idea is for the posts to be short, not to drive you mad with trying to keep up with something. The idea is also then that you read several other blogs and what they’re doing. This is where you grow community: engaging in something others will be looking at, and going and looking at their blogs yourself. Find out more by going to http://www.a-to-zchallenge.com/

So my theme for the month is going to be writing. Looking at the topics I chose, I think that this could be more narrowly said as maybe the business and world of writing, with some highlights on some of the current trends – or dying aspects – of the industry. I guess I do touch on a few more specific points, and for all of this, it will be coming more from my head and my opinions and speculation.

We plan on also doing the challenge on Comparative Geeks, and we’re working on figuring out what topic would be best, given you have two of us who will be alternating writing about things! And also that we want the posts to fit within our blog and be a good contribution to it. This challenge fit our posting schedule over there perfectly. However, there is the fact that there are a few posts that we have scheduled for 2014 that will still have to go up… so we’ll be generating more than our normal amount of content in April!

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