Thinking Outside The Blog

As I mentioned here, I’ve started working for All Vegas Poker.  It’s fun, but it is taking up quite a bit of my time, as you would figure.  I have a lot less free time on my hands these days.  And that is necessarily going to affect the blog.

Obviously I have less time to write.  Further, I have less time to play poker, which is where I get my material.  As of right now, I’ve pretty much run out of “ready-made” posts.  I don’t expect to be playing poker again for a couple of weeks at least.  Now, I’m sure there are potential blog posts buried in my many, many hand-written note pads that I carry with me whenever I’m in Vegas.  And perhaps if I scour my old emails long enough, there are some stories in there as well.  But both of these activities will take time, time I don’t have right now.

So I’m now working in the poker industry and don’t have time to play poker.  Ironic, isn’t it?

Furthermore, there’s something else I’m doing now that will take time away from the blog too.  I don’t want to reveal it yet; all in good time.  But again, ironically, what I’m referring to is something that I hope will bring more attention to my blog, even as it will give me less time to do blog posts. 

The point being that until I get into settled in to everything new that’s going on with me, I really don’t want to let the blog just go unattended for days if not weeks at a time.  It would be really counterproductive for me to allow that to happen.  It would also be counterproductive to just do quickie, low-value posts just for the sake of having something new posted every few days.  

So I started thinking outside the box, as they say.  This blog is just past a year old, and for the first three or four months of it, almost no one was reading it.  Which means very few of you now reading this have seen my early posts.  Of course, in newer posts, the ones I’ve done since I’ve built a readership, I sometimes link to those old posts.  But I can tell from the stats that Google provides, very few people ever click on those links.  Which I suppose begs the question, why do I bother providing the links?  Well, because some people do check the links, and even if most don’t, I still feel it’s the right thing to do and I do want to give my readers the opportunity to find out what I’m referencing without having to search for it themselves.  It’s a service I provide even if most folks don’t choose to take advantage of it.

But what that means is, that old material is new to most of you.  And would be new to any new readers I hope to pick up.  So, I’m toying with the idea of reposting some of those early blog posts during the periods when I don’t have the time to do something brand new.  Now I realize that on a blog, you never really need to do “reprints” since the material is already there, just sitting in the archive, waiting to be viewed.  But just as most people don’t click on links embedded in a current blog post, most folks would be unlikely to click a link to an old post if I just ran a one line new post that basically said, “Don’t have time to do a post right now, so check out this old post here.”

But if I put the entire old post up again as the latest post, people would likely read it as they would read any new post.  If it was familiar to them, ok, they’d stop and move on.  But if it wasn’t familiar to them, it would be the same as if I posted a new post.  Most of my posts, especially these early ones, are “timeless”—they really don’t have an expiration date.   And a lot of the stories in these early posts were the ones that my friends found so entertaining they convinced me to start a blog to share them with the world (as explained here, and yes I know it’s rather ironic to give a link here after what I just wrote).  Another advantage of reposting is that the people would be more likely to comment.  If people are led to an old post, they are unlikely to comment because they realize hardly anyone is going to see that comment, so why bother?  If I re-post, it might get some discussion going.

If I did follow through on this idea, I would try to spruce up the old posts a bit, not only by cleaning up any weak grammar I may have missed, but by possibly relating the story to something that's happened subsequently,  and by adding an appropriate graphic or two.  When I started the blog, I didn’t even realize you could add pictures nor did it dawn on me that it would be a good idea to do so; yeah that’s how naive I was.  And I would figure out a way to clearly identify them as a reprint or a re-post or whatever I would call them.

One of the few things I like about the new Blogger interface is that it gives you the total page views for all of your old posts.  Actually, this information doesn't always match the way Google gives you the stats currently, but I think it's good as a ballpark figure.  And I can tell that some of my earliest posts have been looked at by very few people.  I would only pick posts that show a low number of page views.

My concern with doing this is that would be considered cheesy or desperate or even somehow “cheating.”  Also, I would worry that regular readers would just stop coming to the blog, just assuming everything was old stuff.  I wouldn’t want that to happen. 

So I’m asking for your input here, What do you folks think of the idea?