Metablog (Installment 2): The First Month
I’ve officially been at this for a month, having started Gaming Ballistic on Dec 26, 2012.
What’s happened?
Well, I’ve found it’s not too hard to keep up a pretty steady stream of posts. My wife is less than completely pleased with this.
On the other hand, it would seem that over 450 people have checked this out at least once, and while Blogger reads high for various reasons, it reports about 4500 page views in that time, so I’m probably hitting about 100-150 real views per day. Cool!
More importantly, 170+ comments, which honestly is where the real fun is – the interaction.
No one seems to really use the check-boxes at the bottom of each post, so that’s not a good tool for judging the interest level of particular posts.
The most useful kind of post, to me, seems to be the read-throughs. I’m slogging my way through Pathfinder (slogging because it’s over 500 pages long, and very technical), but I have plans to also review the new FATE Core, as well as GURPS Monster Hunters and Action, which is probably the most under-appreciated two-volume e23 release in GURPSdom.
The post I did on Technical Grappling was well received, so once the Big Damn Ogre is out of the way and we start really seeing GURPS releases again, perhaps it’ll even sell a few copies.
But, it’s fun, and I’m going to keep doing it. So . . . successful first month!
I checked all the boxes. Hope that helps.
I didn't even notice the checkboxes until now.
That might be a real issue. I saw someone else had the check-boxes, and thought "Hmm! That might be a way to get feedback even if people don't leave a comment or a "+1" from somewhere else."
But I think people's eyes get to the bottom of the post and say "blah, blah, attribution and do I want to annoy my friends with this on Facebook, blah" and skip right by it.
"Oh God My EYES!!" is supposed to be more like "don't ever put pen to paper on this topic again," so it's antithetical with "More Like This."
I'm open to suggestions on better categories!
I find that blogging increases my output overall.
Reading blogs reduces it a bit, though. Always one to go and check.
But more than once I started to write a post and realized it was potentially publishable material, and saved it in my folder of drafts. More than once I started what I thought would be an article and decided it was a better blog post because I didn't have to meat to sustain it.
And of course, getting stuff down in writing really helps me understand how I want my game to run.
It's a box full of wins. Which would be an interesting if unbalanced magic item.
I haven't gotten to the point, yet, where I'm cross-pollinating publishable work with blog posts. Probably because my current game experiences are player-based, not GM-based, I'd guess. I need to have my "ideas to flesh out" sticky or something.
I do, however, get inspired by other blogs and the SJG Forums to do blog entries of my own. Whenever I have an idea, I create a new post, with a title, and schedule it off in the future. It helps me focus, and keeps things pressing enough that I must concentrate my thoughts on an item.
FWIW, I come here (and go to Kromm's, PK's, and Peter's blogs) for GURPSy things. I even like the Pathfinder readthroughs where you compare it to GURPS. I guess I'm what you might a call a hyper-specialized blogreader (and forum-goer). I have very little time so I tend to specialize greatly. If I'm playing GURPS (and that's been all I've played since November 2011), then I'm reading GURPS blogs and posting on GURPS forums.
Your musings on anything to do with GURPS are simply guaranteed to get a hit from me, but while I'm here, I'd say I'm fairly apt to check out the rest of the content too. Anyway, great work, please keep it up!
Oh, and I *particularly* like extra-crunchy rules discussions and guns. I think you can see why your blog is especially attractive to me.
(By the way, I go by apoc527 on the SJ Games forums.)