Regular readers of this blog will know that I tinker endlessly with why things work the way they do. My apologies if my latest experiment has come as an unpleasant surprise. I have a reasonably large email readership from that “Subscribe By Email” field to the right of the page, courtesy of FeedBurner. I adjusted the settings yesterday to allow the FeedBurner-ed blog to include my delicious links as a daily list.
Having previously enabled the “email blog articles daily”, I discovered that FeedBurner uses *their* blog contents as definitive, not mine. Obvious in retrospect. It wouldn’t have been quite so bad if the top few links had been my recent discovery of “That Girl From Marketing” and “PPC Discussions” blogs. Nope. It was two curry recipes that I cooked yesterday, instead. That was a consequence of finally recovering from a persistent throat and nose infection enough, that I wanted to eat something tasty…
I am now wondering whether I need to separate my lives (my professional links to paid search, SEO, social network marketing, programming, etc) and my personal links (recipes, flood responses, paper plane competitions). I know that I like two conflicting things – to get a peek at someone’s inner life and to have a high signal/noise ratio. Reading Matt Cutts blog gives me some idea about Matt as a person, his life at Google and in the wider world, as well as all the SEO and spamfighting insights. Similar is William Slawski in his “SEO By The Sea” blog; a mix of the personal and deep professional thinking and research.
At the moment, I’m inclined to the idea that even this intentionally pretty dry blog is a form of narrative; story telling on the scale of lives, as well as professional evolution. The recent arc about IIS being triggered because suddenly, I have clients running IIS web servers – something I haven’t had for, oh, more than five years. It’s a bit like buses, I suppose. You wait forever then a bunch come at once. I’ve got robots.txt and web server log file analysis reasonably well sorted, when I’m using Apache and Linux. IIS is a whole new field of strange problems which is causing me to relearn some stuff I thought I’d mastered around ten years ago, and conducted almost by rote. Amazing how wrong you can be… I’m now reconsidering some of the Linux/Apache stuff I’ve been doing as I can see some techniques that I haven’t previously thought of.
My apologies for any shock and surprise for the recent Delicious listings. I’m inclined to continue them, unless I see a decrease in readership or negative comments here. Your opinions on the mixing of personal and professional elements will undoubtedly offer me some illumination.
I am intrigued, BTW, at the number of emails that come into either the “info@merjis.com” or my email queues, as a result of postings here. I don’t look for email addresses on other peoples’ blogs. I usually leave a comment. However, I have had more emails than comments in the last six months, by a very large ratio. Is it the intimidation of the Comment Policy page? Maybe. But I don’t think that’s it. I have fun with that page. It just has absolutely no effect on the spam that is submitted, at all.
I think the high volume of emails is the nature of the communications. There’s a lot of detailed company specific questions and observations that correspondents would prefer to keep out of the public gaze. I’m toying with adding an “email me” component somewhere – either near the comment field below, or in the sidebar.
