I’m working on some improvements at the site and had a post go out a few minutes ago that shouldn’t have.
If you receive my posts by email and you just got one telling you to sign up for email, which makes no sense of course, sorry about that.
I’m improving how subscribe by email works, and the quality of what goes out by email, so this is all for your benefit. But again, apologies for the annoyance.
It's time to redesign stage.scottberkun.com/. Yay!
I'm looking to hire a designer to work on a redesign of stage.scottberkun.com/ and have my own list of goals and issues. But before I go too far I wanted my make sure I invited you readers, the people this site is for, to speak up about your suggestions, complaints and things you wished the site did better.
Here’s my primary list of goals:
But these are my goals and I’m not the customer here – you are. Any comments, critiques or requests welcome.
What do you want more of? What do you want less of?
Cheers and thanks for reading.
Hi folks. I’m working on a minor to moderate redesign of stage.scottberkun.com/ and I’m looking to hire a freelance designer to work with: I have ideas, rough sketches and beer (and of course money to pay you).
You don’t need to be a unicorn, as I’d likely hire the good folks at 10up to do the development work. But if you are unicorn enabled that’s nice too as maybe I can hire you for both.
Here’s how to apply:
Thanks.
I'm having some work done on stage.scottberkun.com/ today (moving to a new webhost) and the website may be down, or acting strangely, for part of the morning. Don't be alarmed. I'll post again to give the all clear.
Hi there. Just wanted to drop a short note to let you know there have been performance issues with stage.scottberkun.com/. Most of it is increased traffic and some of it is wrestling with Mediatemple, my host, to sort out what can be done.
I’ve been posting every day this month, but those of you who get posts by email may have not received emails. You can see the list of new posts here of course.
I didn’t post yesterday as the site was having enough issues without adding more content. If you have trouble accessing pages or other issues leave a comment here. Otherwise this will be resolved over the next week as I’m likely switching hosts.
Apologies for the inconvenience. Have a nice and issue free day.
There are always surprises in which posts earn the most attention and which are ignored. I’ve learned it’s hard to predict which posts will do well: some well written ones with great title hooks get little attention, and some throw-away quickies do really well. I don’t know any blogger that isn’t frequently surprised.
I don’t worry about traffic much, certainly not on a per post basis. I try to write for the long term, picking topics that will be relevant a year or more from now. I rarely chase headlines for this reason since the effort expended won’t pay off much in the long term. I want much of what I write to still be read a long time after I write it.
With all that said, here are the ten posts I published in 2013 that earned the most traffic:
The big surprise is my book review for The Great Gatsby. Most of the others are advice oriented, which make for easy twitter and Facebook fodder. The review somehow found a good home in google searches before the film came out and never fell off. Like I said, luck is a big factor in which posts pick up attention and which don’t. There are compounding effects too: once a post is popular, it ends up on top ten lists like this one, further ensuring it’s locked in place.
You can also see my best posts of all time, by category.
Twitter is a curious place. It’s used in so many different ways that when I follow people whose work I admire I never know what I’m going to get. I stumbled on this post by Wil Wheaton that offers an explanation to would-be followers and I thought it was wise. It does seem both pompous and useful, and I hope you find it more of the latter than the former.
1. I’m an independent writer and I use twitter to help make a living. About 30-40% of what I tweet about is entirely about me. Either new things I’ve written, places I’m giving a lecture, or news about upcoming books or previous ones. I’m conscious of the balance and try to keep it reasonable. When I have a new book coming out, books being the primary way I make a living, it definitely goes higher during the critical first few weeks, but then trends back down.
2. Twitter is unreliable – you never see all of someone’s tweets or even the best ones. If you’re thinking of following me to make sure you hear about big news, sign up for the email newsletter that 20k people currently subscribe to. That guarantees every few weeks you’ll get a skim-able list of the important things and my best posts since the last newsletter.
3. I hate the term follower and don’t think of twitter that way. I’d have preferred the word “listener” or even “fan” since follower makes me think of cults and drinking kool-aid (if you don’t know where that saying comes from, click the link. you might not use that phrase again). I’m thrilled anyone pays attention to what I do on twitter, but I know you’re all just a click away from leaving.
4. I use twitter to point to good work. I read voraciously and try to spread awareness of good things I find that people who like my work will also like. I rarely post about things I don’t like, or disappoint me, unless it’s about jargon, myths or lies. Twitter is in many ways an extension of this blog, with similar topics, themes and vibes. Of course when I RT (retweet) things it’s not an endorsement, I assume you give me the benefit of the doubt about why I’m sharing something. And I generally read any link I send.
5. I don’t follow many people on Twitter. I often check the profiles of new followers and read some of their past stream. If I love it of course I’ll follow, but I won’t do this as a courtesy – it’d be disingenuous if I did. Twitter by design is non-reciprocal: you can follow people who don’t follow you and that makes sense to me. I do look at all @berkun messages, and like when people cc: me on a tweet about a link they know I’d be interested in (and that isn’t purely self-promotional).
6. I frequently tweet aphorisms and observations. These are simply interesting units of thought to kick around with other people. Sometimes I’m passionate about the idea, but often it’s just a thought I have no stake in, or find interesting even though I disagree with it. Don’t read too much into them or what it means about my current state of mind. If I tweet a quote by someone else, I generally try to verify it’s real before I do.
7. If you’re responding to a post, I prefer blog comments to tweets. Tweets are ephemeral. They get lost. Leaving a comment on a blog lasts forever and guarantees I’ll respond and do it more thoughtfully. Some people reply to a tweet about a new post I’ve written with complex questions like “Did you consider X, Y and Z in context of the transverse Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?” or something similarly thoughtful and challenging, and I often think it’s a shame the question, and my answer, will simply float by in twitter. On twitter few will see that excellent question, or my reply. But if it’s a comment on the blog, most people who reads the post that inspired your question will see it, and they’ll also see my more than 140 characters worth of response. I sometimes even hand copy the tweet of a great question to the comment section to ensure it’s preserved.
8. If I’m on twitter I’ll banter, debate and play. But often I’m not on twitter. People forget twitter is a stream and it’s easy for even @ messages to get lost. DMs frequently get lost too. I see twitter as transient – I’d never ask an important question or make an important request there. If you have something important contact me the reliable way. If you have a topic you want me to write about, ask about it here.
9. I often repeat tweets and link to older work. I sometimes use Buffer to schedule things on twitter. I do this because few people are on twitter 24/7 and things get missed. People in different time zones read more at different times. I post older work because I have a decade of of good writing on evergreen topics: for a new follower it’s just as worthy to them as something I posted fresh that morning. I generally mark old posts with #archive so it’s easy to flag if you’ve been reading me a long time. I periodically tweet about the Best of Berkun list since it’s the easiest introduction for people new to my writing.
But this is merely my view of what I do on Twitter. Does it match your experience? Is there something else you wish I did? Or did less of? Leave a comment.
I’ve been working with the folks at FreshMuse on a new feature: Mind Control.
I’ve always enjoyed Q&A with you folks (see reader’s choice) – now I have a way to ensure this happens all the time.
We’ve built a beta version of Ask Berkun. You get to control my mind and pick what I write about each week.
You can:
I will:
It’s a BETA version. You may find bugs. If you do, please report them here as a comment.
Have fun.
Last month was one of the best months of traffic ever at stage.scottberkun.com/. These posts led the way in views, comments and attention.
Enjoy.
Thanks for bearing with us. The new design is live and the basics are working.
It should look like this:
We’re working on fixing the twitter/fb/feed buttons, and the mailing list signup form.
If you find other issues, from broken links or things on fire (that shouldn’t be) please report them here. Thanks.
Known issues:
As a design minded person I’ve had a long list of fixes, improvements and updates I’ve wanted for stage.scottberkun.com/. I had some false starts and stops in hiring folks to do the work, and somehow its been years since the site has seen much love. I’m so sad about that. You readers deserve better.
I’m proud to report a new design is almost finished and should be live soon.
The main goals for the redesign were:
Here’s a preview of what the new home page will look like. I’ll have more details on the rest of the design soon.
Due to some unintentional shenanigans on my part, comments were not working here for most of the day. I’m sorry. Thanks to some help from Mike Adams, a developer on my team at WordPress.com, all is now repaired.
It only took a zillion years, but stage.scottberkun.com/ finally has fully threaded comments. Now you can disagree with someone, and have them disagree right back, with visual formatting that fully clarifies they are disagreeing with just you and your post, and not anyone else.
Jokes aside, it does make long comment threads easier to read. It also gives feedback to commenters on which new comments are in response to their previous ones.
Oddly enough, I work for WordPress.com on comments and other UI features, so it’s particularly embarrassing it’s taken me until this decade to finally getting around to adding this simple little feature. For good measure, there is also comments paging now, so posts with 50+ comments are faster to load.
If you have other feature requests for the site, now is the time as I’m on a roll.
Here are 5 good reasons you should join:
To sign up, just drop your email address here:
19k subscribers can’t be wrong. Read the privacy policy (written by Max, my dog) + every email has an unsubscribe link that actually works.
For awhile now I’ve done readers choice posts – and I used the now defunct slinkset.com as a way to let you guys suggest topics and vote on them.
I’ve enjoyed it (did you?) and want to continue – but I need a new way to run it.
I imagine there is a) another service I can use for the list & voting b) A WordPress plugin – but I’ve looked and haven’t found good candidates – suggestions?
There’s an old George Carlin joke about how between Idaho’s state motto “Famous Potatoes” and New Hampshire’s “Live free or die”, the truth can be found.
Noticed today, on the this blog, two polar opposite posts, One on Wikileaks Considered, the other on Smell-O-Vision, were the top two. Amazing. Thanks for reading my crazy, and oddly diverse, thoughts.
A few days ago we hit a milestone – Dorian Taylor’s comment on my review of The War of Art, was the 10,000th comment left on this blog. He leaves many excellent thoughts here, so it’s fitting it’s him.
Just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has ever left a comment here, even if it was to tell me how wrong I am or that my words smell funny – I read everything that gets posted, sometimes twice, and it helps me continue this adventure in writing.
I hope you’ll keep commenting – as it helps me to keep writing.
Thanks.
A question on my mind regarding this blog, is this: should I be writing more often? Or writing less, but writing better (however you choose to define it) things?
I want your vote: please take a second? Two clicks will do it. thanks.
[polldaddy poll=3953646]
We’ve had some character set issues on the site – Weird characters showing up in posts.
This issue has been fixed but a side-effect of the fix is some of the posts have been truncated. They just cut off or seem to be missing the last paragraph or more.
We’ve caught most of them, but there are likely still more out there.
If you notice this when reading pages, please leave a comment here or on the post/page itself and we’ll get it restored.
Thanks. Appreciate the help.
Hey folks – I’m on the homestretch to 1000 posts. This is officially #985.
I’m still looking for ideas for what to do to celebrate, or reward all you people for reading for so long 🙂
Please let me know if you have ideas for what to do.
If you’d like to simply suggest something for me to write about, go here.