David Emery Online

Links and schedules

19 February 2008

As you may have noticed I’ve slowed down posting a bit recently, in most part simply due to the amount of stuff I’m doing at the moment. Obviously this is fundamentally a good thing – it’s all good stuff – but there’s no doubt that my five-days-a-week posting schedule is suffering because of it.

That’s not really a problem I don’t think – 3 posts a week, which I can do without a problem (and have been doing for a while if you exclude Friday Links posts – more on that in a minute) seems like a very reasonable amount of posts to make. I’m not trying to be some pro-blogger journalist type, posting twice a day, garnering huge page-views and adwords-bucks, so the rather ruthless schedule seems a little pointless.

Of course the real reason behind ‘The Schedule’ was not for you lot – it was purely for my benefit. I am, by my very nature, a lazy person; it takes a lot of effort for me to be bothered to actually do stuff. Ideas are no problem – I can come up with them all day long – but actually implementing them is always the tricky part (you wouldn’t believe the amount of half-finished – if that – projects I have kicking around). However, if I publicly declare I’m going to do something – like post 5 days a week – it motivates me enough into actually doing it (or at least trying).

So, 3 times a week minimum is the new schedule.

Now, one of the little tricks I came up with about a year ago to help cheat the five-days-a-week thing was the weekly Friday Links posts (and yes, I figured out how to cheat myself. I am indeed slightly odd). Friday Links, being a collection of links collected throughout the week, were a doddle to write which is always what you want at the end of the week. However, they had a couple of problems: 1) they don’t look nice, being just a list of links 2) by the time Friday rolls around, some of the links aren’t really so relevant any more.

So, as the more observant of you will have noticed, I’ve brought in a new ‘Links’ section, which will contain new links on a daily basis and which will show up on the home page and in the RSS feed. Not exactly revolutionary I know, but as big a change I’ve made around here for a while. Hopefully it will mean the long form posts will be slightly more substantial, and the links will be more relevant.