To follow up from my previous post, as predicted, after 10 weeks I have only made 15 posts to Twitter. Some stuff from people I follow is kind of interesting, but it’s mostly filler. At least the spam followers have dried up a bit now.

I guess I’ll keep going with the account, but it’s hard to come up with something worthwhile. Plus, 140 characters is so damn limiting - most posts there look like gibberish with all the abbreviations and shortened links. Is that really the future of the internet?

I’ve just changed the photo for the masthead of this blog, to a picture I took at the Otway Fly treetop walk. At least I know what this picture is, rather than the mystifying old one, which I think was a balcony or something.

OK, I’ve decided to join twitter and see if I’m one of the 60-odd percent of users who forget about it after a month. I mainly joined to follow other users, rather than post my own content. Anyway, I’ll see what comes of it.

Check it out here.

OK, it’s time for a change in direction. This is just a personal blog now. The grand plan was to turn it into some sort of tech site, something like a poor man’s How to Spot a Psychopath, but without the technical knowledge - and to get enough readers to support a few google ads on the site. I was aiming to make a bit of extra cash, maybe enough to pay for the internet bill each month. I had a trial of that, as mentioned in an earlier post, and earned a grand total of $0.00. From zero clicks on the ads. Fair enough too, because I rarely click on ads either. But in order to get visitors, I was trying to write for a large audience on topics I thought would get views.

All that achieved was to get on to google for a few search terms, and a ludicrous proportion of those were for a photo I took of a rather pointless Sony billboard. I could start pimping the blog around different sites, but I have figured that it would then pressure me to keep making updates. And frankly, I don’t have enough to say to make a daily post.

So now, I am going to write for a readership of one - myself. Sure, there’ll be the odd bit of blogspam with a youtube link every now and then, but I have yet to sort out a purpose for this site. All I can think of at the moment is to keep my writing skills up. English ended up being my best subject at high school, though not my favourite. My forte was spelling. In the early years though, I just somehow knew how to spell correctly. Putting those correctly-spelled words into paragraphs that people wanted to read took a lot longer. And now, over the years, I have noticed my skills dropping off. My job rarely requires any lengthy blocks of prose, and so my abilities have atrophied somewhat. Adding to that is nearly a decade of reading crap in web forums from people who consider spelling and grammar a luxury, and I feel that I have become almost dyslexic. I sometimes see spelling errors where there are none.

So I shall continue to tap away here, honing my skills, writing about whatever pops into my head. And greetings to those of you who have found this blog through google, although you have probably not read this far and have, in fact, hit the back button by now. Never mind. I’ll live.

This blog will now be known as Steve’s Journal, rather than its previous title, Bort’s Load of Bollocks. I felt it was time for a name change, along with a change in the focus of what I write about. I have previously tried to make it a tech blog, or one about cars, or something that shows funny videos. But still, with my readership consisting entirely of accidental google hits, with people spending about 1 second here before clicking the back button, that strategy has not worked. Time for something else.

More will come later. So will pics of the new car!

Back on the first of February I tried a little experiment to see if I could get more visitors to look at this webpage. I tried a number of things - listing the site on Technorati and del.icio.us got a few people looking at it. Mentioning a few keywords of the moment got some views - in particular the post about ordering a Dell PC without Windows Vista actualy got a view from someone at Dell, according to the records.

But the main thing that got the visitors in was getting this site on stumbleupon, a site that has a firefox extension allowing you to just go to a random site found by other members of the stumbleupon community. In only a few days, the number of readers went to over a thousand.

After that though, the number of views dropped off and is now back at around zero. Which goes to show that you need consistency, and a lot of entertaining content, to keep the readers you get initially. It can be a bit of a drain coming up with new posts, and it is easy to get distracted with other things… such as gettting mythtv set up. But that is a story for another time…

I have had this blog up and running now for about three months, and I would like to get a bit more out of it. So, I have decided to try a bit of an experiment. I have gone to a few sites that have tips on how to boost traffic and I’m going to try some of the ideas. So here we go:

1. The first tip is to use lists, so here we are.
2. Don’t be boring. Uh-oh, I’m in trouble already, and I’m only up to point two.
3. Don’t just be a reblogger, by constantly posting news that is available elsewhere. I did this when flash player 9 for linux was released, however, and I got my first google hit from it. Now (as of February 1) after a few more posts this site is the first listing for the search "Bort’s Load of Bollocks". Hooray!
4. Listing your blog on Technorati is apparently a good way of getting word out. I have therefore listed this one.
5. Another one of Seth Godin’s tips is "don’t interrupt your writing with a lot of links." Well, I’ve kinda stuffed up there, but that is probably due to learning from the master, Daniel Rutter, who has a link on roughly every third word. And he gets lots of readers.
6. An ugly, poorly designed site with lots of rude colours and dodgy stuff from 1996 like blinking text and sounds playing in the background will drive readers away. So, I think the rule here is, look at someone’s MySpace page and make sure that your blog doesn’t look like that. Anyway, this site design is basically what blogsome randomly assigned me when I signed up. I’ve only done a few tweaks around the edges. But it’s a simple, black text on white background, unlikely to offend, kind of page. With an image of god knows what below the title.
7. Getting the site on digg will apparently unleash an angry mob of idiots. I don’t know if I want to go down that route.
8. Again, borrowing (OK, stealing) from Seth’s article, another tip is to write about blogging.
9. Tagging the site at del.icio.us can also help, according to a number of sites. That is something else I have tried.
10. The final tip I found is to write interesting things about stuff that people want to read about.

Hopefully these tips will be of some help to get some visitors here. I would really like to bring the count up from oh, zero. Anyway, I learned a lot of stuff putting this together. If you are now reading this after finding it on google or somewhere, hopefully some of the above links will come in handy for you, and good luc to you. And me.