Apparently I need to take some courses on how to be a good blogger. I like writing posts, but I don’t enjoy spending countless hours promoting my posts on social media channels. I occasionally am on Twitter, and I auto-publish posts into the desolate wastelands of Google+. But I despise Facebook, and I started an Instagram feed, but so far there are only 6 posts of my unphotogenic cat.
And then I discovered, if I were a good rule-following blogger, I would have wrapped up December with a recap of my year – and a list my best posts.
Instead, I just wrote another post recapping the year in actual architectural news. That post happened to be my wife’s favorite post. She actually said, “This was your best post of the year.” Technically, that post was on January1, of this year, but I assumed she was referencing all of my posts this past year of being a fledgling blogger.
She then mentioned I should do a recap of all of her favorite blogs of mine. Since I procrastinated, and never asked her which other posts she liked. I made a list of one.
Most other bloggers would include their Most Commented post, and their Most Viewed post -but most of my comments came from spammers, and my most viewed post was a result of a spike in traffic after Bob Borson (of the blog Life of an Architect) added me to his Best Architectural Websites 2015 list.
Furthermore, nobody read my wife’s favorite post. Not because it wasn’t interesting, or humorous, but because it takes a person 8 minutes to read it. (And if you still haven’t read it, click on the giant font letters above.)
Previously, I started adding read time to the top of each post, because nobody in my office would read my posts. They would say things like, “Yay. New soapbox post. Maybe, I’ll have time to read it later.” – And the post would be like 400 words. So they basically would be stating, “I like your blog, but 3 minutes of my time is too much to waste on you.” – Or if they were a fast reader, 2 minutes of their time. My view rate duration time as steadily increased, but millennials with ADHD would rather skim Yahoo News and Huffington Post articles than read an 8 minute whopper of a post- even if it was my funniest post thus far.
However, since a list of one is such a short list. Here are some other blog posts that received praise from other humans.
My cousin-in-law’s wife, Dani, said this was my best post. Actually, she said that the Agrarian Pantheon was my best post. But this post is a pre-cursor to that post. Actually, the posts can be read independently, but this post was part of the #ArchiTalks posts – where a group of bloggers (led by Bob Borson) all post on one topic, all on the same day.
And in my humble opinion, this post was the best post of all the other #ArchiTalks posts. Coincidentally, the next month’s blog topic was “Why I am an Architect” – but that’s what I wrote about on this one!
Ok. This is the actual post where my cousin-in-law’s wife, Dani, said this was my best post. And to be truthful, she actually said it was one of my best posts. But I’m pretending she just said it was my best post.
I felt like I probably wrote more than 3 good posts this past year, and some people in my office actually read this one, so I included it here.
I’m currently attending a Procrastination Symposium to help me become more proficient.|1| But at least I got this year-in-review post done before the Chinese New Year.
So cheers, to another year year of blogging about a subject that only other architectural bloggers care about.
Footnotes:
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1 The symposium was supposed to occur last December, but it might happen this week.