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.
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\nMost 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
In frustration, I stopped sending out the newsletter, but I still wanted to appeal to readers.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n