Published in Blogging on Tuesday, August 17th, 2004
A little tip for people who have newer blogs.
Something that I have noticed while posting here on this blog is that, when you aren't a heavy traffic blog, posting a few times a week rather than a few times a day can be better for the visibility of your blog.
It seems that if you leave the quality out there on the homepage for a longer period of time it has a much better chance of being noticed. Even if you post often and have a 'last 5 posts' list or some variation thereof, the longer it's on the homepage it seems the better.
Most of our dev and design blogs are read with RSS readers, so perhaps it's not 'age on the homepage', but rather people are more inclined to read the site with one new post rather than bear the thought of reading thru a site with 5-6 new posts. I dunno. Just what I have noticed here at fiftyfoureleven...
Sitepoint's web devlopment books have helped me out on many occasions both for finding a quick solution to a problem but also to level out my knowlegde in weaker areas (JavaScript, I'm looking at you!). I am recommending the following titles from my bookshelf:
I started freelancing by diving in head first and getting on with it. Many years and a lot of experience later I was still able to take away some gems from this book, and there are plenty I wish I had thought of beforehand. If you are new to freelancing and have a lot of questions (or maybe don't know what questions to ask!) do yourself a favor and at least check out the sample chapters.
The author line-up for this book says it all. 7 excellent developers show you how to get your JavaScript coding up to speed with 7 chapters of great theory, code and examples. Metaprogramming with JavaScript (chapter 5 from Dan Webb) really helped me iron out some things I was missing about JavaScript. That said each chapter really helped me to develop my JavaScript skills beyond simple Ajax calls and html insertion with libs like JQuery.
Like the other books listed here, this provides a great reference for the PHP developer looking to have the right answers from the right people at their fingertips. I tend to pull this off the shelf when I need to delve into new territory and usually find a workable solution to keep development moving. This only needs to happen once and you recoup the price of the book in time saved from having to develop the solution or find the right pattern for getting the job done..
Comments and Feedback
Amen, RSS has changed the way we surf our favorite sites!
Totally, the more I thought about this after posting the more I realize that, in addition, I don't tend to read feeds that send me >3 posts a week.
I'm a bit weird though, as I still like to surf to sites to read posts...
Hmm, you might be right. I do feel a little overwhelmed when I look at a site's feed and see tons of new posts (like the Language Log, which I have no hope of keeping up with.) Probably my personal preference would be no more than two posts a day and no less than one per week.
I agree, and you can always do what keith Robinson does - save entries as drafts and publish them on a schedule.
btw what's with everyone asking me to use p tags now? Something wrong with using the default line-breaks?
Hey Jim, the <p> tags are there to try and allow people more flexibility while commenting and to keep the site sematically happy. Truth be told most people are okay with it, and I haven't had time to whip up a more WYSIWYG commenting system.
I do post in schedules, usually though it's not planned. Posts back up when I'm inspired to write, and get trickled out at, well, pretty random intervals...