January 29, 2018

Ten Years

Filed under: Main — admin @ 12:01 am

This blog went live on January 28, 2008. It was designed as a successor to my weekly newsletter, the Weekly Wambooli Salad. I doubted the blog would last this long, yet here I am 10 years later.

Most blogs die a quiet death. The owner forgets to write new posts. Then they feel embarrassed about not updating, so they don’t update further. Then the blog dies. Even if the blogger eventually becomes active again, it’s betrayed the reader’s trust. There’s no going back.

I started my newsletter as a way to promote my books. It’s something called “marketing,” which is a topic strange to me. Anyway, at its highpoint, the newsletter had some 5,000 subscribers. But it was a pain to maintain. One user on AOL didn’t know how to unsubscribe, so she directed AOL to block all email from my domain. My domain was blacklisted for years because of that.

In frustration, I stopped sending out the newsletter, but I still wanted to appeal to readers.

For a while, I ran a BBS on Wambooli. It was popular, but drifted into silly topics that were fun, but not really related to promoting my books. So I took it down and started this blog.

For a few years, the blog echoed the format of the newsletter, with departments and updates. Then it grew its own style, which is a mix of humor, opinions, and book updates.

After some erratic timing, and not blogging when I was super busy, I came upon a regular schedule: I published weekly on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

At first, I wrote the posts the day before, but sometimes I’d forget to write something. Then, when I was going to be out-of-town for a few weeks, I discovered this blog’s scheduling feature. Now I write all the posts in advance, usually on Saturday, and schedule them out for a few weeks. Occasionally a new topic comes up, and so I re-work the schedule.

Over time, I added links to current blog posts to the support pages here on Wambooli. That way I could provide support and keep pages fresh without having to recode the website any time something changed. Now the entire Wambooli site is fairly automated.

For a spell I added a News blog, Tech Trip. The problem was that it became too much work to keep it current, so it faded.

On my C For Dummies site, I echoed the blog idea starting in 2013 to support Beginning Programming With C For Dummies. I provide a new Lesson post every week and an Exercise post every month, with a solution 8 days later.

Because I was writing 4 blog posts a week (and not getting paid for it, well, not directly), I cut down the Wamblog posts to two a week. That seems to fit well. And I’m promoting the blog on LinkedIn and Facebook, which is part of that “marketing” thing I don’t get.

Here are some stats:

Total posts: 1746
Average words per post: 500
Total words: 873,000
Media files uploaded: 1337

4 Comments

  1. Hi Dan,

    Been a little busy lately so haven’t commented on here, but I do read every post. I have noticed some of the common commentors no longer posting are they still reading?
    I also find the C For Dummies blog/lesson useful as I tend to be an embedded guy so its relavent to me. In short keep it up!

    Comment by glennp — February 3, 2018 @ 3:21 am

  2. Thank you, Glenn. The comments dry up, but I know people are reading the blog. I’d probably have more comments if I had open registration, but then I’d be pulling out fake accounts daily. I also repost some of my stuff on LinkedIn and I get views and comments there as well.

    I do appreciate that you comment! Thanks, Glenn.

    Comment by admin — February 3, 2018 @ 8:01 am

  3. I used to spend a lot of time here but hardly ever visit now. I cant remember when, but a few years back Dan seemed to devote all his attention to just windows and android and stopped blogging on the latest tech that was coming out. Dan found a lot of interesting stuff so I found this place to be very good to find out about interesting tech stuff. But I think blogging is not as big as it once was and now youtube channels have taken a lot of importance.

    Comment by BradC — February 11, 2018 @ 8:43 pm

  4. Thanks for coming back, Brad!

    The blog is more of a marketing thing now, with my echoing the posts on LinkedIn and such. I’m not even sure whether it has any effect, though I do know people read it. And you’re correct, blogging just isn’t a thing any more. My C blog is more popular and doesn’t require as much work. I don’t think I’ll shut down the Wamblog, but I might cut back on the posts to prioritize relevant issues as opposed to maintaining a schedule.

    Comment by admin — February 11, 2018 @ 8:55 pm

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