How Do I Blog, Let Me Count the Ways

Late last year I started to re-organize and streamline cathrene.net, based on some ideas of my own and a year’s worth of observations and experiences following the traditional route with blogging and running an online juried art gallery called House of Scratch. To summarize these observations and experiences, if I can’t do cathrene.net my way then there’s just no point in doing it.

The nature of the changes this year will be purely organizational, the result of finally tightening my focus on how I want to offer support to other creative individuals and how I want to create income with my creative talents. So what follows is a guide to the changes at cathrene.net and the motivation for those changes.

Categories, Side & Header Menus, Navigation

Initially I selected older pieces of writing as posts for the new blog incarnate of cathrene.net. Those posts consist mostly of poetry and a few short stories. All of these posts will eventually be removed and compiled into free .pdf format e-books, as a way to ease myself into learning the phenomenon of e-publishing. Eventually, I would like to offer e-novellas for purchase through this website and some other freebie resource material. This has always been my intention since I first started the blog version of cathrene.net.

With the poems and short stories being removed from the database, there will no longer be a need for Fiction and Non-Fiction category designations and all of the sub-categories, since most of the posts will now be non-fiction in nature. Posts will instead be filed according to a Project designation or a theme such as Health & Wellness for the artist.

Finally, to maximize space and improve navigation, some side menu items have been put into a header menu and the content of two or more pages have been consolidated into one—all to make your visit more pleasant.

Social Networking

Probably the most tedious part to maintaining a blog in particular is the number of accounts required to run one. Prior to blogging, I had five accounts to manage: one for my service provider, one for my domain name provider, and three email accounts (personal, business, and junk).

Last year at some point, I was managing around 20 accounts related directly or indirectly with running a blog. To name a few of these accounts: WordPress, Akismet Plug-in, Feedburner, Ad Sense, Google, Pay Pal, affiliate programs with Amazon and Chapters, Facebook and Twitter and another email account with Yahoo.ca. Add to this list, blog directories, blog carnivals, discussion forums and community boards, and I’m sure the number of accounts is more than 20.

Of all these accounts, the most tedious ones to manage are the social networking ones which include Facebook, Twitter, and a couple of community forums. Quite frankly I’ve lost track of them, because they are more work than they’re worth. That old fashioned email account as a method of direct communication is looking pretty fine for me!

To date, I have reduced those 20+ accounts to 11 and will in the next little while get those accounts to less than 10.

Affiliate Programs

Two of the accounts dropped last year were the affiliate programs for Chapters.ca and Amazon.ca. Over time, the more I learned about e-publishing and the writing industry, the less comfortable I felt about peddling other people’s work. I will continue to do Shameless Plugs for people, and will look into referrals as a potential income stream in the future. Promoting other writer’s work through these affiliate programs—again it was more work than what is was worth and something about it just didn’t feel right. So they are gone.

Comments and Email

Also slated to be turned off from cathrene.net is the ability to leave comments on posts.

Consider this: On one blog you can contact the blog owner through their email address, an email contact form, comments, on Facebook, on Twitter, and name any number of other social networking systems. I understand the purpose of providing options. I like to have options too, but isn’t this just getting a bit ridiculous?

Perhaps the biggest reason for eliminating comments is simply that very few people leave any. I figure if someone does have something to say, they can just as easily use the email contact form which is available through a link in the main header. By turning off comments, I can also eliminate the chore of sorting through the spam and if readers chose to, the options to pingback or trackback to posts will still be available.

The Store, Gallery & Library

Yes, there is an inactive link in the new header menu. The Store. Coming soon. I hope to offer sellable wares there, such as e-books and art prints to begin with. The Gallery will mostly promote my best and current work, all available for purchase as well, and the Library will list .pdf e-books for download instead of links to posts.

That pretty much covers the major changes underway at cathrene.net. With less to manage, more time and energy, perhaps blogging can be more fun and less tedious than it has been over the past year.

If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact me.