ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

ASCII Weblog 2008 —

As we now begin 2008, my little weblog project will be undergoing some changes.

As mentioned in the last entry, I’m dropping out of a self-imposed “post every weekday” rule, which was previously a “post every day” rule. The “every day” rule betrayed itself as impossible within a few weeks and the “every weekday” held up through nearly the whole year, but ultimately was costing me dearly in other contingencies. So that’s being changed.

Now, I’m going back to a pair of rules, both of which were in place before 2007: post whenever I feel like it, and don’t post more than once a day.

This means that you might get posts every day for a while, but then get nothing for a few days or a week. That said, that day or week will likely be followed with updates and information about other stuff I’ve done that I was working on when not writing entries. So you kind of win.

There is a possibility I will post even more frequently, because I don’t have a limit on weekends. But more likely than not, you’ll see a few larger entries a week, or postings that are long on the weekend and then shorter otherwise, but there might be skipped days.

The “no more than once a day” is because I hate that with weblogs, this endless process of adding a bunch of short dribs and drabs that are barely functional as information nuggets and which more often than not are constructed with a lot less care than a single, proper entry. This is a personal preference but I think it worked out very nicely and I’m sticking with that.

I’ll probably touch up the site a bit, maybe remove a few unneeded elements and also create a “best of” page for people. I’ll probaly add a menu bar, and I might even remove the entertaining-but-weird “anti-endorsements” at the top of the page. I probably come off as quite the boner with those, and it has been over a year with them there. Other links and information deserve that pleasant space, and I haven’t been insulted personally by SuperBanana in MONTHS.

I will probably trust in Flickr a little more than I have, and in doing so, we’ll have more images on this weblog, because I often have neat stuff to share and that would make it a lot easier to do so. We’ll see. Otherwise, I’m definitely writing scripts that will generate the raw HTML I need to have information albums or references to the images. In other words, I will find whatever is the most time-consuming repetitive process involved in this weblog and try and optimize it. That’ll help as well. Except more multimedia, in other words.

I show that a few thousand people read me, perhaps only lightly so and perhaps by mistake, but still, that’s a nice audience to have. I get some pretty crazy responses and mail telling me of others who are checking me out, so I know the audience is there. I hope they stick around even as my posting schedule switches around. In the age of RSS, that’s not such a big deal anymore.

So here we are. 2008. Watch the skies, it’s going to be a very Jason year.


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One Comment

  1. AngiePen says:

    Just as a data point, I think the “whenever I have something to say” is far better than “every day” or whatever artificial goal people set. I know a lot of folks say that it’s best to determine a schedule and stick to it, so that people know when to visit your blog, or get into the habit of coming on certain days, but 1) if any significant number of posts turn out to be boring filler, I’m less likely to want to read anyway, and 2) with RSS feeds there’s no reason why anyone should need to visit a blog manually, so the whole “regular schedule” thing is rather obsolete.

    I know a few people who can post that regularly — one even does it every weekday — and actually have something original and interesting to say nearly every day. Most people can’t do it, though, and I’d rather read something cool irregularly, once or twice a week, than have the “habit” of reading something that was just banged out to fill space every single day.

    Angie