Back in April I wrote how my blogging had changed since I reduced my Facebook activity last fall. I needed to create more space again to think and write, and FB was eroding my capacity to do so. Since my break with FB I wrote more than since a long time, and the average weekly activity was higher than ever in the past 16 years. In april I wondered how that would keep up in the second quarter of this year so here are the numbers of the first half of 2018.
First, the number of postings was 203 this first half of 2018, or an average of 7 to 8 per week. Both as total number and as weekly average this is more than I have ever blogged since 2002 on even a yearly basis. (see the graphs in my previous posting Back to the Blog, the Numbers).
Mid April I added a stream of micro-postings to this blog, and that helps explain part of the large jump in number of postings in the first graph below. What microblogging helps do however is get the small bits, references and random thoughts out of my head, leaving more space to write posts with more content. I’ve written 84 ‘proper’ blog posts the last 6 months, of which 50 since adding the microblog mid April, so it has pushed up all my writing.
Blogposts 2018 per month. It shows July as week 26 ends July 1st, which had 2 postings
Blogposts 2018 per week, the micro blog started week 15
Let’s look at how that compares to previous months and years.
Number of posts per month since 2016. Leaving FB in October 2017 started a strong uptick.
I feel I have found back a writing rhythm. So tracking the number of postings moving forward is likely mostly of interest in terms of ‘proper’ postings and the topics covered, and less to see if I blog at all. My steps away from FB have paid off, and reconfiguring my information strategies for more quality is the next phase.
This Article was mentioned on zylstra.org
Thanks for sharing, Ton. Do I get it right that now you have three main groups of posts – “Home”, “Day to day” and “Micro”, with the first one being bigger “thinking pieces” and the second – a sort of diary-like? And weblog RSS containing all of them? Does this distinction work for you? Do you stream anything of these three groups to any of your other social media accounts? How do you feel about (lack of) visibility that they might have – is there any impact on your writing that you are not happy about?
(Back from Russia and puzzling with my own weblog/FB/homeschooling tracking/kids portfolio combination that we would like to have up and running by the end of the summer).
Yes, that’s right Lilia, three groups, main, day to day, and micro. The main group is more work and professional interest related, Day to day more the non-work related stuff that catches my eye, or the navel gazing like this posting about how much I blog or read. Can also be a photo, a quote, or a ‘diary entry’. Micro is more tweet like. The last one is syndicated to Micro.blog/ton where others can respond. The RSS feed is a full feed of everything for now, but there are separate ones too (WP makes category feeds automatically, and the distinction between the three groups is made with categories.)
Not fully happy with this division yet though. It works well enough, but the difference between day-to-day and micro seems a bit artificial. And because only the micro stuff gets syndicated, my ‘main’ postings don’t get the opportunity to draw attention there. So today I posted something on my microfeed about something on my main page. That feels contrived. I may also still want to add a category for bookmarks and other microformats. But not sure yet how.
I don’t post yet from the blog to Diaspora, Twitter or Facebook, other than by hand every now and then. The functionality is supposedly there to do it automatically, but it doesn’t work properly (some of my plugins are clashing it seems). Need to look into that still.
Ton Zijlstra mentioned this on zylstra.org:
Dave wants his old blog back he wrote last year and referenced today in his rss feed, which I totally get.
….I want my old blog back. I liked the freedom. My ideas flowed better.
You know some of blogging is about writing for other people, but I also write to organize my thinking. Scattering things all over the place makes me disorganized. I want it help me focus, to factor my thinking.
This exactly is what made me ditch FB last fall. It worked, and sharply increased my writing, sharing a ….
Ton Zijlstra mentioned this on zylstra.org:
For a few months I used an additional category ‘microblog’ to share small status updates on this blog, next to having ‘front page’ blog posts and ‘Day to day’ timeline like postings. Those microblog postings were als shared to micro.blog/ton The separation felt a little contrived, as I mention in a comment discussing it.
So I decided to undo t ….