What I’ve learned about blogging

Last updated on: August 24, 2013 at 10:23 pm by Jane the Actuary

What I’ve learned about blogging 2013-08-24T22:23:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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In a way, starting a blog is like fishing, but your lake is the comment section of popular blogs and the bait is attempted witty or insightful comments with links to your own posts — because, even if you tell yourself that it’s not about how many readers you have but about developing your writing skills and thinking through issues of the day, you do end up checking the “pageviews” counter and eagerly looking to see if you’ve got any new comments.

But I’ve been mystified and annoyed at the various engines which seemingly view my blog and drive up the pageviews for no particular reason that I can tell, based on the “traffic sources” statistics blogger provides. I googled one of these URLs and the information that came up was that these sites are aimed at the novice blogger, with the intention that the blogger clicks on the URL that shows up as a “traffic source,” which leads to a site with malware of some kind or a scam. I also found that the option to tell the system not to track your own pageviews, by using a cookie, didn’t seem to work for me, and it also seems that any time someone, having made his way to my blog, clicks on a particular post to see the comment(s), it counts as a separate pageview. So all in all, it’s very difficult to know how many pageviews I’ve actually gotten.

I’ve also realized that I have a very small number of blogs that I follow and that are suitable for the project of comment-fishing — the largest blogs/news sites have so many comments that it’s improbable that people actually read existing comments, and many other blogs/news sites use facebook for comments, which doesn’t work, since I’ve taken the approach of blogging anonymously. (I’ve considered setting up a separate facebook account wholly for this purpose, but I’d need an additional e-mail address, which — using gmail, at least — would require setting up a wholly different google account just for my Jane alter ego, and switching between them, which would be a lot of work.) So mostly I comment on sites which use Disqus or a generic commenting system.

(So, dear reader(s), any suggestions of blogs I might find interesting, based on what I’ve written in this blog?)

I also still have a long to-do list: putting tags on the posts, improving the layout/formatting, maybe adding some pictures just for visual interest, plus adding posts on various topics that I haven’t even talked about yet (especially retirement). I’m also not sure how wide-ranging I want the blog to be — focus on economic issues, wander over to social issues, add my latest recipe?

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