Nine Months of Bloggery

A few thoughts on the progress of my tandem blogging adventure of the last nine months...

At the end of 2007, I finally decided to listen to various people who were telling me I ought to have a blog of my own, and since I never do anything in moderation, I figured I would have two.  (This may have been the result of the Very Nice Prescription Painkillers I was on after I had surgery right before Christmas.)  The person who most backed the whole idea vanished abruptly and painfully from my life right about the time I finally made the decision to go ahead, leaving me feeling rather bereft of both moral support and practical advice.  And a few other things.  But I'm stubborn, and I decided it was a good idea to go ahead anyway, or at least a good way to distract myself.  So I spent the post-surgical recovery period popping oxy-stuff and figuring out how the basics of blogging.  Be grateful for your eyesight's sake that I resisted the urge to use any of the site designs I developed while in that particular haze! 

I launched both blogs on January 1 and have kept them rolling along fairly regularly ever since.  The two have very different purposes and styles:

Capering & Kickery (Kickery) is my professional blog, an attempt to build a friendly social dance history research library by putting (eventually) all my dance research up on the web in usable form.  It was inspired partly by the death of my dear friend and mentor, Patri Pugliese, which left the historical dance world bereft not only of his company and guidance but also of the immense quantity of dance history information he had in his head which (despite intensive work in his last year of life) never all got written down and published.  I'm not writing articles in full academic style, but they're strongly research-based and incorporate quotes from and lists of primary sources.  But I also try to include plenty of practical material for people who just want to go out and dance something historical.  I'm not worried about not getting a lot of comments; it's not really that sort of blog.  (Though I do like them, so if any Rixo readers want to wander over and see me in really deep geek mode, feel free to visit!)  What makes me really happy here is the type of hits I get.  I can see the searches and the search results that result in hits, and they're just what I want: things like "how to dance the schottische" or "Regency dancers" or "Civil War dance" or "quick-quick-slow foxtrot."  Those are the sort of searches for which I want to be a top search result, and it's happening: a Google search today had Kickery as result #3 for "Regency dancers!"  I'm still engaged in putting a lot of really basic stuff up, but eventually, once I have the structure of basic information in place, I'll be putting in more complex stuff (citing the basic posts for background).  It will take me years to even catch up to where my research is now, and I'm still moving it forward regularly.

Rixosous (Rixo) is my shot at building myself a miniature online community of people who actually like to listen to me go on and on and on about things.  I used to go on (and occasionally on and on) over at other people's blogs, but I decided that when the ons got to three, I really needed my own space!  I wasn't interested in writing a very personal diary (I don't like having such a thing on the net), and I've tried to restrain myself from too much angst-filled moaning about my life.  It's shown a tendency to drift toward review-blog, since I generally think the books and plays I see and the cons I attend are overall more interesting than my day-to-day existence, which is pretty routine. Fortunately, this seems to interest a few people enough to drop by and comment regularly and a few more who are starting to do so now.  I'm bemused but pleased.  And I'm thrilled that my comment threads are finally starting to take off; I've had a few break fifty comments and one is now past one hundred!  I'm especially pleased when the discussions in the comments go on without me having to supervise and keep them going.  Not having to be a helicopter hostess means I'm throwing a nice party.

I have no idea how all this compares to most infant blogs, but it feels like both are on the right track, especially since I've done no real advertising or outreach for either.  Whatever Typepad's faults (and I have a little list...), it's done fabulously well at getting me search engine placement.

By the numbers:

Kickery:
63 posts; 44 of substance and 19 announcements of my various historical dance activities.  Seven posts in various stages of progress.  A little over 200 comments. 

Rixosous:
94 posts.  Fourteen in various stages of progress; oof!  Around 1400 comments.

Freakily enough, on September 30th both blogs briefly had exactly the same number of hits and exactly the same average hits per day.  Over nine months, that was around 17,500 hits and an average of 63-and-a-bit hits per day.  That's after two and a half months of Rixo being substantially ahead followed by Kickery jumping way ahead after I posted my (infamous?  is it infamous yet?) Regency dance post "Real Regency Dancers Don't Turn Single," which I would estimate has been the destination of a third to half the hits on Kickery; it got something like 4000 in its first couple of months and it continues to get them regularly to this day, which is pretty wild for a six-month-old blog post.  Nothing else on either blog has even come close; the next best was my April first Kickery post, a serious examination of an important and overlooked source for mid-19th century quadrilles.  Rixo didn't start making progress on catching up until July, and then a month or so ago its hits suddenly reached a new level (a bad day is now 40 hits instead of 4) and have stayed there ever since.  I have the feeling that half these hits are from Serge, who's been my #1 commenter and booster from the start!

Both blogs tend to get posts in fits and starts, mostly depending on how hectic my travel schedule is in any given month.  I was assured by people like stakebait that I would not have any problem coming up with things to write about, and that's certainly turned out to be the case.  I have a whole list of topics to get to someday, and it never gets any shorter.  I've developed a really bad habit of writing most of a post and then squirreling it away and never actually polishing and posting it.  Perfectionism run wild.  I've got to work on that, and in the short run at least get the (gulp) twenty-one in-progress posts on the two blogs finished and up.  I'm at the point where I'm starting to actively advertise Kickery via fliers at dance events and links from other dance sites, and I've started using Rixo's URL when I visit other people's sites or send pertinent email.  I want to start actively pushing Kickery as a source for writers, if only to save myself having to write grumpy email to my friends about how badly writers mess up the dance scenes in historical or fantasy-historical novels.

Onward I go into my blogging future.  I'll probably do another assessment-post at the end of the year.

I value all my quiet lurkers and cheerful commenters immensely; your feedback and all those hits keep me going.  Thanks for being along for the ride!

Comments

[Michael A. Burstein]

I'd say your blogging is on the right track. Keep blogging!

[Marilee J. Layman]

It's fun to read and post here, or I wouldn't!

[Serge]

Like I told you elsewhere not long ago, some other blogs can be like a big room party at a con. Rixo is more like a few people who just pull chairs closer and chat.

"...I was assured by people like stakebait that I would not have any problem coming up with things to write about..."

That's true. Sometimes I want to post something, but I'm not sure what. Then inspiration strikes, like recently when Agatha the Cat Genius broke my flashlight. I seldom go for long posts, but sometimes there are things that I feel need more space and preparation. (Hopefully, I'll soon finish that entry about novellas, but first I must sort-of help my wife with that fantasy proposal.)

Thanks for putting up that photo gallery.
And my many thanks for Rixo.

[Neil Willcox]

Rixo seems like a success to me. Of course, all I have to do is read it, nod my head in admiration and occasionally come up with something smart and interesting to say.

(Kickery is even less work for me; all I have to do is read it and then mutter "I didn't know that")

[Susan de Guardiola]

Great international blogging moments:
Arguing in my own comment thread with a gentleman from Ukraine regarding the pronouncements of an Italian dance scholar. Fortunately Oleksiy speaks adequate English, since I'm certainly not up to conversing in Ukrainian or Russian or even Italian once I got past the actual dance terminology.

(This is on Kickery, obviously, in the comments on the overwhelmingly geeky "lead outsides" post.)