Die in a Fire - Eric Florenzano’s BlogWhy the name?

This post is my final post in the blog-post-per-day challenge. There have been days when I really didn't want to blog (resulting in posts like this), and there have been days where I was excited about what I was writing about and spent a lot of time on a post (resulting in posts like this one). It was much more difficult and time-consuming than I was expecting. Another thing I wasn't expecting which actually kept motivating me to write more: actual traffic to this site. Previously this site saw maybe 100 hits/day due to mostly various google hits on certain Django topics. When I started doing the blog post-per-day thing, however, this is what my traffic turned into:

But as I started to look at where that traffic was coming from, I realized it wasn't organic at all. (insert sad puppy face here) In fact, most of the traffic was coming from just a few sites. Here's what my top 10 referring sites were:

Once I found out that nearly all my traffic was coming from reddit, I started to try to cater towards that audience. To reddit's credit, however, the more I tried to target content towards what I thought redditers would like, the less successful the articles did over there. Either I was doing a bad job of writing articles for that audience, or they wisened up to my act (I'm thinking the latter is more likely).

I was also very surprised by which articles turned out to be the most popular. Here's the list of articles that I thought were my best:

1. Easy Multi-Database Support for Django
2. Writing an Markov-Chain IRC Bot with Twisted and Python
3. Lambda Calculus
4. Drop-dead simple Django caching
5. Using CouchDB with Django
6. Why CouchDB Rocks
7. "Web Hooks"
8. Reverse HTTP

Here's the list of my top 8 most popular articles over the past few days, in order, by traffic:

1. Gems of Python
2. Why CouchDB Sucks
3. It's caches all the way down
4. The internet is in immediate danger of collapse
5. Why use VARCHAR when you can use TEXT?
6. Using CouchDB with Django
7. Why CouchDB Rocks
8. Secrets of the Django ORM

Interestingly enough there are only two posts that appear on both lists. Really, it surprised me which articles got picked up and which didn't. I suppose it has something to do with the sensational titles and the sometimes-controversial posts. Specifically the VARCHAR/TEXT post got much much more push-back than I was expecting. In hindsight, I was wrong to mention anything other than PostgreSQL and SQLite, as those are what I've actually done the TEXT-only experimentation in.

After doing 14 screencasts and now 30 blog posts over the past few months, I'm pretty well spent in terms of creating new, original, content. That's not to say that I'm going to stop writing here or anything like that, but certainly I won't be posting quite as much. When I do, it will be because I legitimately have something to say, instead of because of an obligation.

Thanks for visiting my site while I participated in this challenge. I hope you stick around.

Whenever I tell people that I'm participating in this blog post per day event, most people begin laughing hysterically. Then the next thing that people typically do, unprompted, is to start making excuses as to why they don't blog. Most of the time it is something like, "I don't feel like I have anything important to say," and sometimes it's more like "I tried it but nobody was reading it, so I gave up." These are valid reasons why someone shouldn't blog.

But you shouldn't make those excuses, and you should blog anyway. Firstly, writing is a valuable skill in any profession. Simply forcing yourself to write more helps to improve your writing abilities, and ensures that you're able to organize your thoughts in a way that others can understand. Even if it doesn't make your writing any better, it will make you more aware of your shortcomings as a writer. Myself, for instance: I have found that a big problem with my writing is that I start too many sentences with conjugations. I also use way too much of the passive voice and alternate between subjective personal pronouns.

Another reason why you should blog is because it forces you to look at things from different perspectives. I can't count how many times I've begun writing an opinion post, and give up after a while because after putting it into writing, I realize how weak my actual argument is. It makes me question some of my opinions. Conversely, if the argument comes across as strong and obvious, then I am even more certain of my opinion.

Finally, blogging is a classic chicken-and-egg problem. If you don't blog, nobody will read your blog. If people don't read your blog, you won't want to blog. Fortunately if you just remain steadfast during the beginning portion of your blogging life (and make sure to participate with other bloggers who talk about similar things as you), then people will surely start to read your posts.

Honestly now that I'm reading through this article, it seems a bit weak. It's 11:15PM and I can't think of another subject to write about before midnight, though, so this post will have to do!

I hope that you guy start/continue to blog, because it really is a good habit to get into.