There are a few things that every most
The first two are plugins and themes.
They will add every single plugin available to their blog. Look at the sidebar of some recently started bloggers (not wp.com bloggers – there’s no plugins for them) and you’ll see the sidebar and plugin list changes regularly as they add a weather widget, Adsense, a shoutbox, a few RSS feeds and a couple of other random bits and pieces they hope will get them that extra penny in revenue.
Next up is mucking about with or entirely changing the theme. I admit that I regularly change the theme, either because of boredom, I screwed the theme, I deleted it (yep I did this once!), or they just see something that the y prefer to what they are using now.
Thankfully I have (I hope!) got past these two stages. The next hook for the new blogger is popularity. Most (regular) bloggers will admit that they are stats whores:
“Who’s looking at my blog”, “where are they from”, “why aren’t they commenting?”, “What’s my Technorati/Alexa/… rank”.
Well, I am proud to say I have got past that too. How do I know? Because today I turned off my stats plugins. I had wp-shortstat running for ages. It was interesting information but the page took two or three minutes to load. With the number of people that have run the shortstat project I can never figure out what is the latest version so never bothered fixing it. I also today removed the Google Analytics hooks.
Why? I realised that I have stopped stat whoring. I hadn’t looked at Analytics for nearly a month. I had a quick flick through and just though “yeah, whatever”. I know I have readers, I get comments.
I write stuff because I want to. If you want to read and comment, fantastic! If you don’t want to read, that’s fine too. I just decided that I’m not going to worry about my “popularity”. It’s not a contest anymore.
You’ll just have to accept the fact that I am still Technorati Tagging. That’s blog promotion, not stat whoring!
Not every blogger goes through these stages. Yeah, I can see where you did all that stuff yourself but I’ve hardley done anything to my blog’s theme since it started. It’s all about the writing to me. Not making it look flashy or how popular it is. Really don’t care. Never even looked to see who’s visited or how many hits I’ve had.
:o)
Nice, yeh I’d agree with most of that. Most importantly for me – “why aren’t people commenting”, which bugs me sometimes. But like you said, lately I’ve become less worried about that and just blogged stuff because I wanted to.
A nice read Collin, well interesting!
Funny enough, my AWstats in my cpanel decided to stop working on Friday.
God i’m hanging my head in shame, it would appear that i’m a stats whore. Cant help myself, just have to look :-(
Hehe – modified the post Pam, is that better? :)
Lloyd – wait until you get your own domain!
LOL
yes ..yes it is
;oP