Syndication
After a weekend filled with olympic levels of procrastination,tinkering, and really quite useless meddling, the words and pictures I post to the blog will now pollute the wider internet as never before. This is a good thing. Perhaps. I know I promised to stop posting about geeky crap, but given that I have no life to speak of at the moment, this is about as good as it gets today.
Now the blog is kind of concreted into place (I paid for a year remember, and I'm damn well not going to waste that money), I've been playing around with the various free syndication mechanisms. Back in the day you would just make sure your blog could pump out a valid RSS feed, but these days the game has changed somewhatyou have to “play nicely” with the likes of BlogLovin, Pinterest, and Medium in order that people might find you by any other means than you either begging them to visit your blog, or doing what so many others seem to dovisit a thousand blogs a day, liking everything, or writing inane comments in the hope that you might attract a few fish back into your net.I'm not going to play that game.
Oh crikeyI didn't mean to set out on a rant.
I guess the reason I have such a hard time promoting myself online is because I hateadvertising. If I ever get duped into watching a video on a websiteperhaps because they are promising that some actress fell over hilariously and all her clothes fell offI will invariably roll my eyes when the two minute advert for health insurance starts, and close the browser tab. Every. Damn. Time.
Don't get me started about pop-ups. Web designers who either implement pop-ups, or use the target=”_blank” attribute on anchors should be burned at the stake. Users should be given their own choice over what happens when they click a link. They are quite capable of holding CTRL down when they click, if they so choose (don't tell me you didn't know about that?).
Anyway!There appears to be four main methods of “helping” people get to your words and pictures.
E-Mail Notificationthis kind of relies on people signing up to be told that you've posted yet another rant laden forget-fest that they might want to subject themselves to. I'm using MailChimp to do this for me for free. It took a bit of fiddling with to get working, but now it sends out an email every night like clockwork (if I remember to write anything).
BlogLovina rather wonderful scandanavian blogger told me about BlogLovin a few years ago. It's really just a huge RSS aggregator, but it's been prettified enormously. It makes your blog look goodno really. Click here to go see what it's done to mine. The idea of course is BlogLovin try like hell to keep you in their walled garden while you're reading, and following other bloggers. It's also a pretty good way of finding other blogs to read.
Pinterestwho would have guessed that Pinterest would be a good candidate to pollute your words with? The theory goes like thisif you have a niche blog, you can “pin” each post into Pinterest, which (if appropriately tagged) will encourage others to accidentally click on your content, and get sucked into your beautiful prose before they realise what they've done.
Mediumthis is tantamount to cross-posting, but the current darling of the web publishing worldMediummakes it very easy indeed to import content from elsewhere. While this was obviously a tactic to fill Medium with content quickly, they've made it so easy it would seem a shame not to use it. I guess the hope is that some billionaire VC might stumble upon your humble blog and make you instantly rich and famous.
If you try any of the above out over the coming days, give BlogLovin a go. It's kind of like a prettier version of Feedly, more designed for bloggers, rather than journalists or marketers scraping news feeds.
Right. High time I took my nerd hat off, and returned to the normal world (except my normal world is writing software, so I will still be sitting here, and still be staring at a screen, and still growing my ass until it's the size of Jupiter).