Sunday, August 5, 2012

Forum Following and Blog Growth

I recently joined a forum on philosophy as part of a small effort to improve my blogging.  I've not completely given up on my attempt to keep my blogging topics varied but as I'm obviously spending more time on the topic of philosophy I might as well embrace it (at least some).  Well, never mind as I'm writing this I'm looking for a language learning forum also.  Turns out, it's a lot harder to find a forum on language learning than it was for philosophy!  The first few sites I tried were either blocked, suspicious or full.  I did end up finding UniLang.  Hopefully it's active, I used to be an avid forum follower/writer, back in college.

Recently, I've taken to reading and writing blog entries.  I follow several blogs, mostly on runningrunning barefoot, barefootedness in general, an NPR blog, the resurgence blog, and of course my buddy Will's blog.  This isn't a comprehensive list either, so, obviously I'm a big fan of blog reading!  I use Google reader as my blog reading tool, it's cool because it allows you to keep them all in the same place (trust me I don't visit every one of those pages every day), and you can organize them into folders (sometimes, it's a little glitchy on that part).  All in all I spend about thirty minutes a day reading various blogs and news pages.  One of the pointers I read about improving my blog is to read more and write less, I take it that pointer means that bloggers should concentrate on quality NOT quantity.  I totally understand that, though I'm just proud that I've been able to maintain a regular schedule (sort of).

My next step in this blogging experience is a blog carnival.  I know, new term to me too!  I guess it's a sort of round-table blogging experience where people with similar type blogs all submit entries for each other to read and comment on.  In all my blog entries the only thing that gets me down is the lack of comments on my entries.  I commonly make requests for responses but most often I don't get any...  So, all you out there in the blogosphere (yeah, that's you, if you're reading this) please feel free to comment.

---Update, 13 May 2013---

I follow the stats for my blog and I've noticed this particular entry is my most popular entry and I'd like to put in an update to improve this entry.  First off, all the things I've done to improve my blog have worked, at least I think so.  I concentrate on staying (somewhat) on topic, and I feel that my NOT focusing on timelines allows me to produce better work.  I haven't been all that active on the philosophy forum or the linguistics forum but I have been seeking out various sources of information on that front.  I do regularly frequent the forums on Goodreads.com and I still read several different blogs.  Unfortunately, Google Reader is going away soon and I'm still looking for a replacement, so far I've been using a Mac program Reeder, though it relies on Google Reader so it might stop working when the site stops working.  I've been running a series, which helps keep me on topic and it keeps me somewhat on task and studying the same series of lectures.  One of the most rewarding things I've done through my blog is the blog carnival I host.  I use blogcarnival.com to advertise my carnival and it seems to be doing well.

I still find it ironic that the most viewed entry on my site requests comments and I still don't have any.

Working on my macro photography