One Year Anniversary of Comparative Geeks – The Sunday (Tuesday) Reblog

I posted this yesterday over on Comparative Geeks. Today would be the to-the-day anniversary for us starting our weekly schedule of posting. I ask below for more ideas for posts, for input from my community – and I would happily accept input here as well! Let me know what you would like to read from my blog!

Last year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Holly and I started a blog. We had been toying with a few different ideas, thinking of what niches we saw and conversations lacking. And we thought a lot about how we talked about things, and what we wanted to say. And Comparative Geeks was born from that – the thought that we would talk about Geeky things, and not alone or by themselves, but in comparison to each other, or to other aspects of life.

I’d like to think that we’ve accomplished that, and written a blog at least a little different from what else is out there. For instance, we’re not a news blog – there are other blogs out there doing a much better job of giving you day-of updates on what’s going on in the world of geek. We tend to speculate a bit more instead. Nor are we a review site – there are other blogs out there doing episode-by-episode show reviews, issue-by-issue comic reviews, and more detailed sorts of movie reviews.

Instead, we’ve taken our comparative approach – things like our LitFlix, which compare the book or comic to the movie based on this source material. Or like our Science Fiction and Religion posts, which consider a topic often touched in science fiction but which is treated in interesting ways whenever it shows up. And we have now, for a year, successfully kept up with our publishing plan – six posts a week, three each. Granted, not always on the days we plan on, but we got you some content!

And that leads to what has been great about this blog: you. The readers. While we had enough to say that we likely would and could have kept going on our own, you make it all the more worth it. While we may not reply to comments in a timely fashion, know that each one makes us happy. When you take the time to read our posts, thoughtfully consider them, and add to the conversation? That’s where this is worth it.

So that’s what I wanted to do for a one-year anniversary post: ask for input from you, the readers, on what you would like us to write about in the days, weeks, and months to come. Help us make another great year for Comparative Geeks!

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10 Great Things From Blogging This Year

It was nearly a year ago that my wife and I planned and began to build our blog, still going strong today. We’ve kept with 6 posts a week, 3 each, with the occasional guest post. We’ve used a variety of post types, like I learned about in my class on blogging – though perhaps not as many as we could.

We do a great deal of reviews, talking through the things in our life we’re experiencing – mostly the geeky things. But then, what might one expect from a blog called Comparative Geeks?

From a blogging perspective, we’ve seen some great results, though there’s more that could happen. We are happy with where we are at, not planning on this as a form of income, or necessarily caring about being a big thing. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not nice to get noticed, seen, read, shared, and the community-forming we’ve seen this year has been great. So let me walk you through ten great moments for Comparative Geeks this year!

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Publicize – Results from my First Test

So, as I mentioned yesterday, I was testing out Publicize on multiple channels. I think the test was pretty successful. The Twitter feed here on the site does not show the post to Twitter, as advertised – which is good, because otherwise you would see the post, with a Tweet next to it telling you the post was there. As I’ve mentioned before, Twitter is less of a reader and more of… something else. One of its better uses being perhaps its ability to feed into other things, like the WordPress sidebar, or Facebook. More on that below.

I ran into one snag: When shared on Tumblr, the blog post then kicked in the automatic share there – effectively, Tumblr’s version of Publicize. This resulted in two Tweets. The one from Tumblr also ended up in the sidebar here on the blog. It looks like my Facebook had been logged out on Tumblr, otherwise I imagine it would have ended up there twice as well. This was easily solved – I have turned off these automatic shares on Tumblr, but am still linked in where I should be able to share when I want to from within Tumblr.

From here, I have some further thoughts on Publicize… check out what I’m thinking, and then maybe let me know your experiences with it! (Also, I have just learned how to embed a tweet: http://en.support.wordpress.com/twitter/twitter-embeds/…)

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Internship: Done! Now what?

Hello dear readers!

I have completed my Internship in Library Science, and am pretty proud of the final product. I built the base of a virtual collection of materials about the Treadwell Mines here in the Juneau area, and it now looks pretty excellent. You’re welcome to check it out and give me feedback in the comments below!

http://treadwellsociety.com/home/

Meanwhile, that means I am trying to get back to the rest of everything in my life, because I am now done with my Master’s in Library and Information Science! So I have some things I want to talk about, things I want to explore, so let me lay out some of what’s on my mind! Read more of this post

Time for a Rebuild

So I have been doing most of my blogging on my other blog, Comparative Geeks. And honestly, the schedule we have set up for ourselves has been great – we post three times a week each, my wife and I, and so I am writing much more often than I had been. Which feels at least a bit like the answer to the question of why a writer should have a blog.

So I could just write this one off and walk away, I suppose. But that’s not what I’m thinking. Because now that Comparative Geeks has traction and is off and running, it’s time to come back here. Because people are finding Comparative Geeks. With search engines, through WordPress, through Facebook and Twitter and Google+… the things I have learned have come together to a solid 20-30 views a day. Obviously, we would like to see that reach more, but that means more thinking and research and experimenting needs to happen… and that’s what this blog is for.

Because this is a blog about blogging and writing. Read more of this post